AIRPLAY UPDATE MAY 13

I don’t know Sarah Nyberg.

She’s apparently a “fat, ugly psychopath with a broken poorfag family,” according to something called the Encylopedia Dramatica.

She’s also a “creep,” “cretin,” and “walking piece of human excrement,” according to something called the Ralph Retort.

And you know what? I got no problem with that. If a couple of niche websites want to insult people, go with God. Free speech is a bitch.

Here’s what I do have a problem with: Nyberg recently described how she’s been harassed because, “I had been openly critical of GamerGate for quite some time.”

In a March post on a women’s website called Ravishly, Nyberg — who’s transitioning from male to female — wrote…

Photos of my immediate family members that had passed away were sent to me with vile messages — some blaming me for their deaths. I was tweeted pictures of my house, along with messages asking if I would rather be shot or stabbed. Threatening emails were sent to my friends, some of which were severe enough to require contact with the police. My websites were taken down from distributed denial of service attacks.

GamerGate supporters don’t deny this, but do they decry it? Some admirably do.

“That’s pretty gross,” begins one comment on a popular GamerGate subreddit called KotakuInAction. “We’re better than that.”

Of course, that same comment called her “a disgusting individual.” And you know what? I got no problem with that. People who passionately disagree often hate each other. Just ask Congress.

Here’s what I do have a problem with: it’s never, ever right to harass someone. I don’t care what they’ve done.

I only learned about Nyberg yesterday from an anti-Gamergater who linked to Nyberg’s column and asked me…

hello, just wondering: what part of “ethics” and “minimise harm” fits this fall under?

While that’s a tough read, it makes a tough point.

I’ve been working with a pro-GamerGate committee to help me find speakers for AirPlay — and I’m planning to do with the same with an anti-GamerGate committee — so I asked them about Nyberg.

We had an interesting exchange. So let’s break it down, because it cuts to the core of AirPlay.

Before we dig in, know this: I have no interest in rehashing old grievances or taking sides. I only want to use this example to explain my own views — and what AirPlay will and won’t be.

Allum Bokhari told me…

There’s always the question of how much examination of a person’s personal life is relevant/newsworthy. Obviously, most people considered it relevant in the cases of Bill Clinton and Anthony Weiner, but they were both politicians… I think it’s an open question as to whether Nyberg’s past is up for scrutiny or not. I personally prefer writing about ideas to hatchet jobs, so I’d lean towards “not,” but I can see why others might disagree.

Those who disagree say Nyberg’s hacked personal accounts reveal she’s probably a pedophile. My reply: Then call the cops. That’s what a responsible citizen does. But what about a responsible journalist?

In journalism school, this is a common ethics class conundrum: You learn about a crime, but do you write about it first before reporting it? The class always concludes: If the crime is serious, you report it.

When John Smith asked others about Nyberg, he got an anonymous response that riffed on the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, specifically the oft-quoted section titled, “Minimize Harm”…

Calling Nyberg out for having fantasies about molesting his cousin and his pedophilia minimizes harm.

Not even remotely. The very first entry in that section says…

Journalists should balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness.

If a journalist ever chose to divulge such personal (and hacked) information, it would come after much hand-wringing and many editors’ meetings − and no colorful language like “broken poorfag family.”

Journalists know that such language always says more about the writer than the source. That’s why, even more than SPJ’s Code of Ethics, journalists adhere to Mom’s Admonishments:

• “Would you like it if I did that to you?” The Golden Rule is easy with your pals but a pain in the ass with your enemies.

• “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” Even if Nyberg doxed GamerGaters — a claim I’ve also heard and don’t care to know if it’s true — it doesn’t grant moral authority to do the same.

I’m hoping AirPlay’s speakers and listeners, on both sides, will think often of their mothers on Saturday, August 15.

“I’ve never liked the personal attacks that escalate the ‘sides,'” William Usher told me. “These kind of ridiculous back-and-forth antics have been going on for nine months but [there are] no actual attempts at conversations or discussions.”

AirPlay is that attempt.

I’m taking a big personal risk believing most GamerGaters agree with what I’ve just written and the committee has just said — that harassment is not only wrong but stupid. If you want to win hearts and minds, you don’t clench your fists.

Usher insists most GamerGaters are passionate but not abusive. He told me about a now-dormant self-policing force called the #GamerGate Harassment Patrol, which scored some successes.

I’m not sure what happened to it, but sure sounds like an excellent idea. Maybe it should come back. I’ll even help. Why? To prove A Man in Black wrong.

He and I had a private email exchange yesterday — part of which he publicly posted, so I’m not violating any confidences — where we debated what percentage of GamerGate is hateful.

He maintains it’s 100 percent…

I cannot make this any clearer. On one side, you have a group of people risking nothing to borrow your platform’s legitimacy to justify their abuse. On the other, you have a group of people who have been abused by the former group and will face a gauntlet of abuse to, at best, maintain the status quo that GG is an abusive hate mob with no legitimacy.

So far, I’ve witnessed a far lower percentage. But then again, it’s only been a couple weeks, and I’m traveling in smaller circles.

To GamerGaters, A Man in Black is a troll himself. But I understand him. He has a friend who spoke out against GamerGate and suffered mightily for it. When you get shot for dissenting, it doesn’t matter if an instigator or true believer pulled the trigger. You flinch the next time someone raises the topic.

While my discussion with A Man in Black played out on Twitter, one GamerGater tweeted me…

I don’t think it’s worth a try, @a_man_in_black absolutely refuses to listen to reason and knows jackshit himself about ethics.

I replied…

Funny, that’s what people told me about your side a week ago. I always believe in trying to talk.

Here’s a true test of GamerGate’s commitment: Tell A Man in Black you understand. Calmly and politely tell this man you despise: l’ll do my best to prove you wrong.

For the next three months till AirPlay actually happens, Usher knows the entire event is one controversy from collapse…

There are third-party trolls who will go to the ends of the Earth to prevent the SPJ event from happening, and there are those who will use every tactic in the book to be disruptive.

While I don’t have a personal stake in who “wins” AirPlay, I have a professional investment in its peaceful execution. If you care about AirPlay — whatever side you’re on — then I have a favor to beg.

I believe 10,000 reasonable people whispering can drown out 100 trolls who are screaming. If another Sarah Nyberg-like atrocity happens between now and AirPlay, let 10,000 posts like the one on Reddit decry her doxing.

Most comments on this blog, even the ones critical of me, have been smartly written and not at all offensive. If it had been otherwise, I never would have gone this far.

Now it’d be nice to go a little further: Comment below on the seedy side of Gamergate. Convince my fellow journalists and your wounded opponents that they have nothing to fear by attending AirPlay.

Or call me an asshole and watch AirPlay burn to the ground. If that happens, I’ll simply apologize to my SPJ peers for my naïveté and move on with my life. But you’ll spend a lifetime wondering what might’ve been.

Dave Rickey didn’t want me to write this post at all, fearing it’s a troll magnet that’ll “lead us down the rabbit hole and into Hell.” It’s certainly a risk, but it’s also a summons to both sides: You have the power to keep it civil. Your whispers can be quite loud.

Friday:What I’m offering anti-GamerGate.

275Comments

The past few months have made me very wary of AMIB and Nyberg and I don’t believe a single thing they say and I personally despise them but I can see that you’re believing both sides as much as you’re skeptical of them.
Which is in my opinion the best thing to do.

Now is not the time to prove which side is right and which side is wrong, this will be in august.

I will do everything I can do to make the Airplay event even possible.

So what you’re asking is that we accept responsibility for what bad apples are doing, accept responsibility for what trolls who want to stir the pot are doing, accept responsibility even for fake or non-existent incidents of harassment, and apologize ad nauseam for them… “or else.”

This is little more than guilt by association (and yes, it’s exactly the same as if you were to cancel the event because of the things you were called by your colleagues, it’s wrong.)

I, for one, will not accept responsibility for these people. I will not apologize for them, and I will not bow my head and repeat “this is wrong” as if I need to be ashamed over the actions of someone who could just as easily be lying or trolling. If you (or anyone else) decide that this is a valid reason why there should be no polite, logical debate, then chances are we were never going to get one in the first place.

After watching a stream where I saw Sarah make one of the guests cry with baseless claims of transphobia and such, It was hard for me to find any sympathy for her whatsoever. Still, i never wanted to see harassment/doxing/attacks on anyone.

I want SPJ to happen, because i want Gamergate to end, and i think it will help to bring it to an end.

and when it does end, we’ll hopefully see a lot less of these kinds of attacks.

it’s important to understand that there are absolutely 3rd party trolls who are doxing ppl. I myself just got evidence of 3rd party trolls attacking Brianna Wu for example. evidence which i have no problem showing u in private.

these folks are the ones who will attempt to burn the bridge SPJ wants to build. Not GG. and you can’t let them.

On Nyberg: What invites more harassment, being against an 8month old hashtag, or being a pedophile? Not saying the threats couldn’t have come from GG, but if it’s all just for purposes of speculation, why not assume the most likely candidates.

On GGHP: It’s never going to come back. Why? Because it was a lightning rod for harassment. Every troll it managed to slow down, only turned it’s attention towards members of the GGHP. Proving AMiB wrong, isn’t worth Inviting harassment down on ourselves.

Suggestions for AGG: Try contacting Brian Crecente. He’s AGG, very involved in games media ethics, News Editor at Polygon, and even has a 0 marks on Deepfreeze.it (lesser = better).

most people in in the #GG community despise The Ralph Report. Especially after how he tried to blame the suicide attempt of aPRoGG Trans figure on AGG for his clickbait headlines. It was a tactic constantly levied against the Gamergate community on multiple different occasions and is absolutely appalling when done to anyone. he is the epitome of Clickbait scummy internet blogging that has brought down the quality of news around us.

ED is made to be as offensive/cruelly “funny” as possible for all and any entry. while i cant approve of what it does, ED doesn’t really have it out for Nyburg or any specific individual.

William Usher has the right gist of it for the most part. The community’s voice was ignored, silenced, and mis-represented for so long, with almost no attempts to sincerely reach out and communicate and discuss issues, that anger and bad blood have come to dominate the discussion. its hard to hold civil discussions with individuals and media organizations that have put it to print repeatedly that you’re terrorists, misogynists, trolls, sock puppets racists etcetc. its come to the point where a lot of people just have no trust left to give these people.

i sincerely applaud what you’re doing. others like Boogie2988, and Totalbiscuit (two of the absolute biggest names in internet gaming cultures) have tried to do what you do, but they were met with cold shoulders and scorn by the games media. (as well as numerous death threats). hopefully you, who is an outsider to this scene, will be able to have more success. i wish you all the luck.

“Convince my fellow journalists and your wounded opponents that they have nothing to fear by attending AirPlay.”

The thing is they have everything to fear by attending it. They are in the wrong and they know it, they know this narrative they are pushing is not based in facts, and all that GG criticizes about ethics is accurate, otherwise they wouldn’t have silently updated their sites’ ethics policies. I’m sure a thousand people already said it but check deepfreeze.it

Yes, untoward things have transpired and people otherwise dedicated to the cause have exceeded it seeking personal satisfaction, but not without cause and not eithout provocation. Nick and Jay have been engaged in regular libel for months, rounding up a posse to attempt to run people off 4chan, off 8chan, twitter, reddit. They are not innocent and they act purely out of malice, not concern. A concerned friend of Chelsea Van Valkenberg might have tried to dispel any lies told about her. They are not her friends—and so they have sought to abuse their ideological opposition. There is nothing which either of them contributes to a conversation on ethics or video game industry policy.

I think you’ll find that most of KotakuInAction is against harassment. I think you’ll find that most of GG is against harassment. I also think you’ll find that KIA and GG have a different definition of harassment than the anti side.

You will find that the anti side considers it harassment for you to talk to them on Twitter. You will find that they think disagreement is harassment.
Making an argument against their arguments has been called harassment.
Showing them a tweet they made previously that contradicts their latest tweet is harassment.
Talking about Happenings that involve them is harassment.
Mentioning them, if it’s not in a positive light, is harassment.

None of those things constitute harassment except in the fictional bubble they have created.
Certainly there are a few trolls that DO harass, send nasty comments and threats, and even doxx. As you say, that’s a very small minority. But as you know people focus on the bad and not on the good, which is why the GGHarassmentPatrol failed – they would report a harassing account and because they put the victim on their mentions (X is harassing Y, report to @Twitter) they would be labeled as harassers making the victim relive the harassment.

GG condemns doxing. It condemns threats. It condemns hacking and IRL actions. It is against, for example, calling someone’s job to get them fired (something that antis pride themselves on doing). But it doesn’t think that talking about someone or disagreeing with someone is harassment.

Most of Gamergate want this to happen, and that is a given. You are us asking to decry harassment and trolls which is something we have spent 9 long months doing. I wish we could promise you that nothing else will happen, but that would require having complete and total control over every single party involved in Gamergate, trolls included which just isn’t realistically possible.
Do I think what happened to Nyberg is horrible despite any personal feelings? Yes of course, just like what happened to Quinn, Wu and anyone on the Pro-Gamergate side that was also doxed/harassed. Again, this is something we have spent 9 months decrying.
The biggest chunk of us are just regular gamers that joined this consumer revolt because want a cleaner more ethical press and have no part in any form of harassment or doxxing whatsoever but we have been painted as bad trough guilt of association trough the actions of third party trolls. It’s like living in an apartment complex and someone in the building commits a crime but it’s on you to apologize and be slandered for it. Do you know how incredibly frustrating it is? Especially when our opposition are the type of people who if a bird shits on their car they will automatically blame Gamergate?
Very well though Michael, I will as I have done for these entire 9 months and decry any foul play that has happened regardless of what side it happens to because I am a decent human being that genuinely wishes no harm to anyone. And it goes without saying that most of Gamergate will do what they have always done and report anyone that doxxes, LIKE IT HAS DONE TIME AND TIME AGAIN.

But you also HAVE GOT TO understand that we are not Superman and we cannot realistically be everywhere and there are things we cannot control and trolls will take advantage of that.
So once again, we will as we have always done decry incidents like this and report them. So I ask you if any incident should occur to hear the whole story before you decide to pass any rash judgement.

Look, I’m not going to apologize on behalf of anyone else. And I think it’s fair to say that not many else will. However, yes, anyone who doxes or harasses anyone is a terrible person and doesn’t deserve to be a part of the conversation. That goes without saying I think.

People will criticize you for talking to AMIB and Butts because of the kind of vitriol they’ve been slinging around. But it will be the same kind of criticism from aGG for talking to GG. There’s a lot of bad blood on both sides, and I commend you for calling GG on it. My hope is that you can convince both sides to stop screaming about past grievances and just TALK for a day.

Exactly. Have the actual journos that GG has a problem with be on the panel, lets hear them explain why GG is wrong. A troll and a trans woman have no part to play in journalistic ethics, unless of course they are writing for the publications in question.

Wait are you seriously looking at Dramatica as Journalism? It’s basically a wiki set up in the language of the chans. Every entry on the website is set up like that, it’s pretty much the theme. GG didn’t write ED, and it’s kinda disingenuous of you to act like they did.

Some of us still have permanent search on #gamergate harassment set up. I have seen some abusive trolls being account being reported and then disappear from twitter 1-2 weeks ago. All harassment patrol does is to report broken twitter TOS. So, if troll or abusive account keep it within twitter TOS, then there is not much we can do.

Basically, there is not that much directly abusive trolling as it used to be and what remained is often still withing TOS due to wording etc. E.g. if the tweet contains or links someone address, it will be blocked. If it hints where that address might be or smears someone or is rude, then the twitter will leave it where it is.

Harassment patrol slowed down due to:
* main organizers becoming often target to harassment,
* being flooded with off-topic tweets and nonsense that forced you read 100 tweets of to find one genuine report,
* the amount of direct abuse going down since then – afaik we just do not see that much of direct threats and gore pics.

Tl;dr: if you tweet #gamergate harassment patrol and provide link to abusive tweet, we will still respond and block. Just please link that tweet not only account in general, so we do not have to dig through ton of irrelevant tweets just to find whether there is something against TOS or not.

I honestly ignore and try not to comment on her. I agree with your Golden rule sentiment. It’s not something I want done to me. Still, she’s been in the faces of so many people with wild accusations, that they’re going to pay attention to this. -_-;;

In the near future you’re probably going to be flooded with examples of harassment that each side has suffered from in this huge controversial mess as each side attempts to show you how bad the other side must certainly be. I imagine I don’t need to tell you of all people this, but scrutinize the evidence and logic given very closely, as false flags and anonymous attacks are the bread and butter of the trolls that are trying to inflame this controversy. It’s easy (too easy, sadly) for people on each side to lose sight of the fact that those in the opposition are just like them, so we few folks (too few, sadly) trying to encourage communication are hoping you will be the just mediator who gives everyone a fair shake, and helps us to straighten out this morass of blame and preconception.

One of the problems with A Man in Black, is that he’s actually openly engaged in harassment himself, while claiming to fight harassment, such as the time when, out of the blue, he tried to get his followers to dogpile SJ activist philip whythe (who is actually neutral of gamergate as a while) for his series of videos pointing out patterns of abusive behavior present in thezoepost. A man in black just tired to get his followers to dogpile him out of the blue one day with seemingly no provocation. I seem to recall Sarah engaging in similar behavior as well, but I can’t think of any specific examples off the top of my head.

This actually is leading me to a broader point about the seedy side of gamergate. It’d be foolish to suggest it doesn’t exist, but gamergate is hardly exclusive in it’s seediness. The thing that’s incredibly frustrating is that both sides have absolutely no shortage of bad actors, but the bad actions by those opposing gamergate seem to get completely ignored. I mean I think it’s kind of appalling ho things such as the targeted harassment and defamation of games writer Liana Kerzner by subreddit gamerghazi, and the multiple swattings and doxxings against supporters of gamergate (not from gamerghazi just for clarification) get completely ignored, while gamergate constantly and consistently has to answer for everything people have accused them of.

I have a major problem with the fact that you just seem to accept the Idendtity based politic narrative that an Anti painted about SrhButts. I recall most in GG decried that dox as they do any dox. But we also dont know who did it first off but they lie and say that GG did it without proof in those stories. Not to mention that SrhButts, Sarah Nyberg has for the full 9 months been constantly inflammatory, Slanderous and Libeling peoople, usually with cherry picked screen caps of others accounts, engaging everyone and anything under the public hashtag in attempts to shame people or defame them into silence. She is not some innocent bystander that made a one off comment not she has been a very public anti GG activist, and is open to as much scrutiny as anyone for he very public attacks on a myriad of people.

The next point is many are left to wonder about, why are you going off on this derailing issue. She was not a journalist or one of the publications being challenged.

Hey Mike, is this a deliberate attempt to sabotage the consumer revolt? Why are you asking for PR stunts from followers of an online hashtag that anyone, ANYONE can use anonymously? Do you realize what you’ve done by making this issue not about about professional ethics in game journalism, but about harassment, identity politics and PR? You’ve just committed the very act that we as supporters of #GG have been submitted to for these past 9 months from most online media outlets. You are no different from them. You are buying into the narrative. You are drinking the Kool-Aid.

I personally am not going to flagellate myself and cry “I’m sorry, I’m sorry for being an unwitting accomplice in these actions performed by someone completely unknown to me online, vaguely connected to a cause I root for”.

We’ve been fighting for the games media to become more pro-consumer for 9 months. We don’t want to be sold subpar games for $60 because they’ve been promoted deliberately by a clique of corrupt game journalists. I’ve got both my hobby AND my money at stake here. I won’t grovel in the mud for it, but I sure as hell will wrestle someone down into said mud if need be (not literally).

Sarah Nyborg was not hacked, the logs were public, she not only discussed her own fantasies about her 8 year old cousin, she solicited cyber sex from minors, and pictures, to which users of her own site demanded she stop doing.

Sarah Nyborg tried to get 8chan shut down as he called it a haven for child porn. Not only is there no child porn on 8chan, she tried to get the owners income stopped.

Now tell me, what has this to do with SPJ? Sarah is the most prominent critic online of Gamergate, but never an honest one. She was not hacked, she was an open pedophile.

We are free to discuss this and inform her supporters, who are in denial. This has NOTHING to do with SPJ, are we journalists?

I’ll just sum it up this way in terms of what I think Nyberg is. I am worried at this point that she might be a Nick Bate situation. If you do not know who this man is, I highly recommend you look him up. I believe she needs help. She does not need to be coddled. She certainly doesn’t need to be harassed. Neither should her own harassment be excused. Personally, I don’t think this particular piece was the best idea, but I understand how you feel about her. All it does is draw yet more attention to a mentally disturbed individual.

On a_man_in_black: He is known to lie and misrepresent arguments to favor him as best as possible, because he has a vested interest due to his past with Kyle Orland working on the style guide in a previous institution of game journalists. That is why I do not trust his word on these things. Worse, that maroon constantly conflates burgersandfries with gamergate. The events are linked but not the same. The primary difference is the danger involved between the two(Because doxing during the burgersandfries era involved social security numbers), and numbers. Gamergate has been the tamest controversy that I have seen. That’s why he amuses me by attempting to play up the danger of it. Also, I have already demonstrated a tweet of his during his filibuster to you(specifically, about how he openly admitted to being in this to “bloody his knuckles on nerds”). https://archive.is/kr7U1 which should help demonstrate that he has a rather strong bias against any real discussion. If you want the issues resolved, you might want people that want to talk over ones who will do nothing but call the other end terrorists.

One other thing that should really blow a hole in their pathetic narrative: They have accused me in the past of organizing a targeted harassment campaign. If they really had such a strong case, why not bring me to court or call the authorities? It’s not like I’ve been hiding after all.

As far as the GGHP is concerned: I’m more than willing to continue the reports if people bring out the call (#GamerGate Harassment Patrol), but it got bogged down in false reports and people intentionally trying to bend the purpose of it. GGHP was meant to deal with death/rape threats, and doxing. It wasn’t meant to deal with simply hurt feelings. Since there have been less death/rape threats and doxing, there has been less of a need for it as a result. https://archive.is/4mZSD

So you’re going to write a post about GG supporters being harassed by anti-GG next, right?

Or are you going to simply ignore all the harassment pro-GG people have received over the last nine months, having written an entire post dedicated to one of the biggest trolls in anti-GG, painting him as some sort of victim?

“GamerGate supporters don’t deny this”? Bullshit. I deny it. So Mr. Nyberg wrote some rubbish on a blog, without a single shred of evidence to back it up, and here you are, giving him more attention. Well. That’s just fantastic.

“Even if Nyberg doxed GamerGaters it doesn’t grant moral authority to do the same”. I completely agree, except there’s one problem: Nobody in GG doxed Nyberg. If you have proof to the contrary, I would LOVE to see it, and I will denounce and condemn whoever did that. And even if that were the case, I’d really love to know why you’re blaming ALL OF GAMERGATE for the actions of a single bag of human shit.

Anyway, you seem extremely credulous, so let me share my story with you: Nicholas Nyberg, aka Sarah Nyberg, has harassed me repeatedly for the last nine months. He has doxed me, stalked me, posted pictures of me to his social media profiles that were taken without consent, has hacked my computer and stolen my personal information, committed identity theft and credit card fraud using said information, and poisoned my dog. You can go ahead and write a blog post about how horribly I’ve been harassed by ALL OF ANTI-GAMERGATE now, thanks. There’s no need to investigate any of my claims. Evidence is not necessary

You know what? I wouldn’t particularly care, if you’d decided to be fair about it. Instead, here’s your blog post sitting here, putting the spotlight on the harassment claims of a known troll, while ignoring the mountains of FACTUAL, DOCUMENTED harassment of GG supporters.

Alright. Okay. GG is sucking away too much of my time already, but fine. Let’s talk about GG supporters who’ve been harassed. Here are some who’ve been doxed:

– Liz Finnegan having a picture of her ejaculated on, and her entire family doxed, with specific mention of GG. She stopped talking about GG out of fear for her family’s safety.
– KingOfPol, GG supporter, getting SWATted and having a knife sent to him.
– Randi Harper, creator of the GamerGate Blockbot, a “guilt by association” blacklist, doxing a GG supporter, publishing his email address on Twitter.
– Roberto Rosario, Chairman of IGDA Puerto Rico, getting doxed and having violent threats against his children sent to him for criticizing Randi Harper’s anti-GG Blockbot.
– Daniel Snider getting doxed by someone, just because he supported GG. He later found the person who doxed him, but did not press charges against her.

Threatening your employment is another favored anti-GG tactic:

– Ben Kuchera harassing “AE Yika” (I don’t know his real name) by repeatedly contacting his employer and trying to get him fired for supporting GG.
– Jason Miller, credited with co-founding the #NotYourShield hashtag, getting fired from his job for supporting GG, after anti-GG repeatedly contacted his employer.
– Matt Rischerion, engineer at Blizzard, joking about how the Blockbot list should be used as an employment blacklist targeting GG supporters.
– The failed boycott campaign of Seedscape, a game Jennifer Dawe worked on, just because she supported GG.

Let’s continue:

– The IGDA listing the GG Blockbot as “a tool to block the worst harassers”, neatly labeling every person on the list, myself included, as harassers.
– The recent bomb threat to the GG in DC meetup, after known anti-GG columnist Arthur Chu tweeted a cryptic message claiming “it’s ending tonight”.
– Kiwikku, a black GG supporter, being harassed by anti-GG/GamerGhazi who refused to believe he was black, even after posting a video of himself proving so.
– Randi Harper AGAIN, telling all her followers to harass Chris von Csefalvay, including sending death and rape threats to his wife, until he left Twitter, for the crime of publishing data studies neutral to GG (he has since returned, as far as I know).
– Months’ worth of hitpieces labeling GG supporters KKK, ISIS, terrorists, misogynists, racists, a hate group, subhumans, etc.

Need more examples? Just Google search “Gamergate harassment”; the first link should be a Tumblr blog featuring harassment of GG supporters. Or search for “jennofhardwire harassment”, also first result, linking to a WordPress blog with more documented harassment. And that’s just for starters; ask GG supporters, and they’ll come up with many, many more examples than I can right now.

Also, let’s take a moment to address the GamerGate Harassment Patrol. Do you know why it was shut down? Because the idea that GG could prevent all of the harassment on Twitter was, quite frankly, laughable. Never mind the idea that GG should have to be RESPONSIBLE for preventing all harassment, lest it be blamed on us for no reason, like you’re doing now.

“It sounds like an excellent idea”? Great! Then you can run it. On your own. In fact, better idea: Call it the Anti-GamerGate Harassment Patrol, and hand it off to A Man in Black. He can be responsible for policing all of Twitter for harassment! He wants to whine about it, so now it’s his problem!

Of course, that also includes preventing harassment of GG supporters, and I’m not sure he gives a damn about that, so maybe he’s not the best pick for “Defender of the Realm”, eh?

“You learn about a crime, but do you **write about it** first before **reporting it**?” I don’t get the distinction. Sounds to me like, which part of a song do you write first, the words or the lyrics?

Encyclopedia Dramatica is never going to give a fair and balanced story. It’s purposely outrageous and doesn’t claim to be factual or unbiased. I think it’s funny.

Alongside the Golden Rule and Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right, there’s also Don’t Do or Say Anything You Don’t Want to See on the Front Page of Tomorrow’s Newspaper. I realise that might curtail a lot of people’s activities, but there’s truth to it, and thinking of it has stopped me from committing bad behavior more than once.

Nyberg is a notorious troll; I’m barely on Twitter and I know he’s vicious and hateful. Let’s also not forget Don’t Dish It Out if You Can’t Take It. Sorry to say but sometimes a troll deserves a little shit slung back at him; and when he attacks Fredrick (owner of 8chan) for hosting “loli” porn, which is legal, yet he himself is an admitted pedophile, does he have a leg to stand on? (Fredrick doesn’t but no pun intended.) We didn’t hack his accounts btw. I certainly hope the police and his minor relatives are aware of him by now.

I don’t recall any Gamergater claiming to be choir boys and girls, we are human of course and will lash out at those who attack us, but we aren’t monsters either. I wish those who can’t control their emotions would get off Twitter.

As you know, most aren’t journalists and are trying to learn about the ethics and best practices. I just came from a KiA discussion about Wikipedia saying things like “Anita Sarkeesian feared for her life” and a lot of the posters had no idea that was (ahem) problematic because the writer seems to be inside her head.

This debate is a big deal for us and I can’t wait, I’m super grateful it’s happening, but unless you want us to pretend, it’s going to show us ‘warts and all.’

One other thing I’ll add about Sarah: She is mad because /gamergate/ wouldn’t go after /baphomet/ whenever they decided to dox her due to her part in trying to get the entirety of 8chan shut down for child pornography. That is why she got doxed. Her trying to blame gamergate for her issues with 8chan is typical though. Does it make it okay? No. Does it mean that it’s going to happen anyways? Yes.

So there is just so much historical context you’re lacking here unfortunately, that leaves you with a “You must decry their harassment/doxxing” request, not knowing the history of us having done just that for MONTHS and months and months over and over, spam reporting harassment on twitter, and to the FBI etc etc etc.

And yet we still get blamed for it, no matter what we do.

Look, we as a group have always decried the harassment and doxxing.

Why would we want it to happen when it gives our enemies ammo to point at us and say “see they’re all hateful misogynists!”

The logic just is not there.

By now people have grown apathetic to the accusations and write the accusers off as crazy people (Sarah Nyberg and AMIB certainly included there). So why should we go back to pleading to be relinquished for things we haven’t done when we know from months of experience that it does no good?

I know you weren’t there for all of that sir, but the experiences we’ve had in this are noteworthy.

Considering that AMIB and Nyberg have been the two leading the charge picking out which GG supporters should be harassed, giving peoples details to a person with a known history of criminal violence and AMIB has himself admitted he only got involved to “bloody his fists on some nerds”

I struggle to find empathy for the two, especially with Nybergs penchant for gravestanding in fact her treatment of multiple people is disgraceful (for instance how she treated a survivor of Elliot Rodgers’ shootings and the memory of his victims)

I don’t condone the harassment Nyberg has faced, I won’t claim it hasn’t happened – she offers us no such common dignity.

Now on an other tangent, the information outing Nyberg as a pedophile was not hacked, it was open to anybody who used her website which distributes pirated software and an IRC she frequented.
This information was attained entirely legally and has been preserved on an archival site which duplicates content directly from the source site.

I’m part of the demographic that blocks and ignores Nyberg unless she steps into something I’m watching/doing.

A lot of the hate comes as retaliation on a personal level, many having been told by Nyberg what they must be thinking, with her assertions being posted out and spread on social media; people want to be able to go ‘Here’s what’s in your head. Like that being done to you? Stop talking about me/people I know like that or forcing me into membership of some conspiratorial organisation you’re made up.’

Then there are, of course, trolls. As she is a lolcow, she will be milked. That cannot be stopped without tightly regulating the internet and removing anonymity.

However, this is also deliberately utilised as part of a strategy to force acceptance of two factual assertions: that ‘GamerGate’ is a single entity or organisation (membership of which only people like them really know), and that it has leaders.

You will notice that it is not ‘so-and-so has said this’, but rather ‘gamergate has said that’.

(AMIB and Butts are the obvious examples, but there are far more individuals endorsing these ideas.)

People are rightly irritated at being forcefully associated with and being accused of being in an organisation with random strangers, but that’s not the point. The idea is to claim that harassment is all connected, and that it is lead or instigated by a small handful of individuals.

This tactic has already had legal ramifications, Eron Gjoni’s gagging order is based on this pair of assertions. Mostly, though, it’s just to get outlets to smear those ‘leaders’ and make them socially responsible for harassment.

Online harassment is hard to pin on someone. I had a problem with people harassing me and, here in the UK, the police told me that simply not blocking someone is soliciting contact. I could only get help after blocking them from everything and they tried to get around it. This is why painting it as an organisation is so important. This way, they can block the ‘leaders’ off their social media (so they can’t be told they invited contact) while claiming this organisation of theirs is their means of bypassing these blocks.

This is why they’re so keen to say people are ‘members of GG’ or ‘in GG,’ and any (relatively) big name they’d love to see tarred is a ‘leader’ while they agitate random internet trolls to pin the work of on these names.

Why are you even talking to trolls? You have William Usher there, it’s the equivalent of equating William with a twitter troll.

Nyborg is a propagandist, take the time to research her twitter. She is supported unanimously by Agg for her propagand, she is praised and soon to be model of a Kickstarter celebrating Feminist.

But she is a self confessed pedophile, she DID solicit cyber sex and pictures from minors, she was told to stop by her own community, she had her computer seized by police, she admitted she had pre teen models on her computer in encrypted files.

Do you think she will address this, or do you think she will say she is being harassed, and that is all you will focus on?

Oh and, one of the people involved in that recent fallout you’re writing about, Auntie Pixelante (I forget what other name he goes by) who is painting himself as a poor downtrodden victim, was one of the worst trolls going, and right after posting his poor-me account, told softspoken Eron Gjoni to ‘fuck off and die’. So much for victimhood.

Well it sucks what happened to Nyberg because it makes GG look bad too. Harassment is never cool for anyone. Once you make yourself a public figure in the debate you run the risk of getting doxxed, especially if you’re attacking people, because it makes you the perfect target for third party trolls who want people to believe it was the opposition (not that it couldn’t have been someone in GG, but still).

Also, people like A Man in Black are unfortunate. Much like like Nyberg, he too uses GG as a scapegoat to project his fears of the ills of society on. Online trolling is intangible and so convincing oneself that they are the physical manifestation of all evil is a way to turn a hypothetical enemy into something tangible, as a means of ‘dealing’ with it. Ultimately though you deny so many people a voice just for self-gratification, it’s a cowardly thing to do. These people don’t realise that you can never defeat trolls externally, all you can do is win the internal conflict by being at peace with yourself, knowing their words can’t hurt you. All you do by throwing tantrums and generalising is paint a big target on your back. People who hate on the trolls, in vain, and use them as leverage to control free speech are just nuking a whole city to kill some people that they see as terrorists that they think might live there. They tend to have very totalitarian and authoritarian tendencies, and ironically do not realise that if you try to cut off their heads they will just keep multiplying. Again, it’s the lack of ability to be at peace with oneself, the obsession with identity being a means to an end, and the the tendency to lash out at something intangible that aGG seem to have in common. If we can find people who don’t do this to be our opposition at the debate I think we’d have a much more fruitful conversation. Including making their side not look so hysterical.

Hi, I don’t know if you’ll read this, but I wanted to address your comment on the Gamergate harassment patrol.

The reason that is mostly dormant (all though it *does* spring into life on occasion) is because despite all it’s best efforts and the vitriolic abuse that ‘pro-Gamergate’ has received, the anti’s consistently said that we were still harassing women, and papers internationally were uncritically repeating the lie. People in the patrol just went “well, what is the fucking point of putting in this effort if we’re just going to get everything dumped on our doorstep anyway”

This is the one angle I am particularly worried about when it comes to the debate. What good will it do anyone if the aGG side has none of the people from the GameJournosPros list & just has their e-celeb trolls that espouse the same garbage & lies like it’s a regular 9-5 job. We claim ethics, they claim harassment. Rock and a hard place.

Ask for proof, they claim harassment. Show proof when asked, they claim harassment.

Nyberg has found acceptance & popularity in all this. That’s what’s driving her most. If you were in her position, would you want to give that up?

Am I saying she’s received no harassment? Of course not. Am I saying it all comes from Gamergate? Again, of course not. It’s easy to blame a group or a hashtag & not accuse individuals which may put the accuser in a legal spotlight. Again, proof is not one of their top priorities.

Journalism, like most things, has changed over the years. If my perusing of history is somewhat correct, one big rule is never become the story. Journalists, past a pleasant greeting, didn’t mingle with people they reported on. You dealt with politicians, you don’t attend their home for dinner. You cover sports, you didn’t go out drinking with the defensive line of that cities football team. Journalists are supposed to shine light on the truth, not help it be hidden away with lies.

I’m a big fan of the old comic strip Bloom County by Berke Breathed. They had a newspaper in it called the Bloom Picayune & it’s tagline was ‘All the news that’s printed to fit’ playing off, obviously, ‘All the news that’s fit to print”. That is, sadly, what most journalistic outlets have become today.

I truly hope having the debate will have some type of positive effect. I know Gamergate already has. I never expected to have to be part of a group that drug game journalists into the light & put a magnifying glass on their ethical ‘sins’.

There’s only so many times you can punch a wall before you look at your bloody hand & go ‘ouch’.

1.) Assuming a man in black is genuine, are you sure he wants to be dogpiled by dozens of gamergaters – even just to tell him we understand? Because many of us saying him the same thing amounts to dogpile and his twitter account being unusable for discussion until it goes away.

There is a risk (and big one in his case) that if we would do that, he would twist our words and intentions and accuse us all of a new wave of harassment.

2.) This is really not only theoretical, gg moderates used to often say “we are sorry” or even “we apologize for those trolls” around september/october/etc. Those words were twisted as admissions of guilt and that is when multiple of us came to conclusion that apologizing for something we did not done is a bad idea.

3.) Yes, I do understand someone picking a side based on friend being mistreated. I do understand crossing the lines cause you are angry. I understand it happens on both sides. That understanding does not make it a good idea to engage someone with their track record again.

Not everyone whose friend was mistreated went out of his way to “troll” so much – on both sides. Whatever sarahbutts done does not excuse that hack and spread of information. Some of us learned to ignore those two people tweets no matter how baiting or ridiculous or insulting a while ago – I just wish more people would do so too.

I don’t know Sarah Nyberg either, but I’m very familiar with her sophistry, hypocrisy, antagonism and mastery of the fallacy of composition.

She’s an agitator and has invested what seems like obsessive levels of effort into ensuring that no useful conversation can take place. I may have missed it, but I can’t recall a single attempt from her or “a man in black” to engage in any kind of rational discourse.

That said, she has nothing to fear from me unless she’s so hypersensitive that being told to fuck off will destroy the very core of her being.

Your true test ain’t exactly a test that works well. Sorry, nine months says I understand quite well who I’m dealing with on both of those accounts. Dave’s got the right idea that this is totally a troll magnet too but really, I’d say it’s more because you’re pushing certain ideas of what GG is that aren’t there. Your idea of it seems incomplete still if you really think you’d get something like “10,000 posts… on reddit decry her doxing.” Not because we’re assholes here but because we’re individuals. Asking individuals to behave like a collective ain’t gonna work. You are solely responsible for your own actions and do not apologize for things you did not do.

Now, as for convincing people what they have to fear or not I don’t think anybody can promise that and they shouldn’t. Best advice is to simply see for yourself. Get on /v/, get on GGHQ, get on KIA (or don’t right now, if they’re still having their civil war), get on Twitter and check the hashtag. Lurk for a couple days, follow some accounts, and wonder what the big deal is. Quite frankly we’re the world’s kindest boogieman. Some anti-GG who read that would immediately scoff but the people who get the worst of it have a trend of being abrasive provocateurs or are themselves caught in scandals, usually the ethical kind like plenty of conflict of interest cases. If you’re scared of a bunch of gamers posting on chans, reddit, and twitter then I’d say you’ve got your priorities wrong. Are we crude and lewd? Absolutely! We also have moments of paranoia and can be quite suspicious too, though once the guard’s down it’s super easy to get into. Though really, any group that literally friend-zoned a porn star a day or two ago sounds like a group you don’t need to be scared of. Unless you have a fear of getting friend-zoned and are yourself a porn star.

Speaking as someone who advocates for agg to have their own selection committee and a panel of speakers who they themselves feel best represents their views, I say that you will have more productive conversations from that side with someone other than a_man_in_black. A great many other people would fit that bill.

To be clear, I am not encouraging you to stop talking with a_man_in_black. In fact, in the interests of skepticism and fairness, I encourage you to continue to do so. Just don’t limit yourself in the number of people you talk to.

And yes yes, I do condemn doxing towards any side or any person, always have, even as it falls on the deaf ears of mainstream media.

Anti-harassment patrol also slowed down because they were tired and frustrated after spending hours tracking down violators and reporting them and when they’d tell the target what happened, no thank you, no acknowledgment, just BLOCKED.

I learned about GamerGate very late. I am an old gamer and stopped reading the big games sites years ago so I knew very little about what was going on at the time. But since January I have spent a LOT of time getting up to speed. I am no expert and do not spend time on the Chan-boards and have not for years. I stopped reading games site because of the click-baiting and non-games related articles they continued to pump out just FYI. On my research I started thinking GamerGate was indeed a troll group attacking women. I quickly learned the truth however is far from that and you MUST understand the chan culture to know how this all developed. So as a tip… Learn that history.

There is a serious discussion here though and even though I am not part of GamerGate, I support what the GamerGate folks are trying to accomplish and support the reasons for it. The first step to fixing the Ethics in gaming issue (toxic communities, collusion, trolls, doxxing, swatting, you name it) is to get the Game Journalists to be on the side of the gamers. We cannot fix issues with PR and Production companies buying reviews, and lying about gaming stats (multiple games released as preview with a different build in order to raise hype then given a broken finished product, etc) until we can TRUST the gaming journalists. The Ethics discussion is the first step to fixing the crap that has been going on in the BILLION dollar industry for many, many years. THAT is why gamers are hoping SPJ works.

That is also why people will do anything to stop it. Because it is the first step to correcting the mistakes that many of them profit from in one way or another. Many of those denying the above issues are the same ones that should have been the ones calling them out. Writers should be fact checking and providing the information correctly, so now I ask you Michael. (hope that is not to formal)

If GamerGate supporters should be apologizing for an anon’s actions, can you verify the action actually took place… Or is that just the victims statement?

If a Congressman claims a Senator assaulted them, wouldn’t you verify that fact FIRST before making a statement saying all Congressman should denounce any assaults?

Does GamerGate denounce legitimate doxxing and harassment? YES… When it can be proven to have happened, it gets rejected and it was even the 8chan(maybe 4 chan but I think I am right) boards that worked very hard to suppress leaked information on Brianna Wu until a mod woke up to get rid of it. They down voting it into hiding until it could be removed completely. These things and the Anti-Harassment group GG started never get referred to.

But asking a group to denounce something that has not been 1. Proven to have even happened (not saying Sarah’s was not, just saying overall), and 2. That it had anything to do with the GamerGate supporters, is honestly a silly thing to try and force on said group.

I urge you to make sure and VALIDATE things said against GG Supporters before assuming to take things on faith. This is the kind of things GG folks are up against. Libel statements that cannot be proven, that people just believe without evidence.

I do thank you for what you are doing and hope to Allah, God, Or the Giant Spaghetti Monster that this goes off without a hitch.

Why is she important to this incident at all? Why is she even being mentioned? I understand him bringing up the journalistic ethics of reporting on her, but afaik ralph is the only one who did. Harassment is terrible and anyone facing that has my sympathy. That only goes to a certain point though. She’s a disingenuous asshole who perpetually stirs the pot by taking quotes by randoms or those ill equipped to debate and saying they are representative of the thousands of people who actively engage in all of this.

What hacked accounts is he talking about? Afaik it’s just the usual googling of info to reach the conclusions this piece https://archive.is/B8ozd does. This is only important to whats going on because she went to the worst place on 8chan (a pedo board) and said gamergate supports that because we also use the site. When information came out that she engages in the exact thing that board does (immoral pictures, but not illegal) and no one who was attacking 8chan and/or gamergate came out against her, it showed how willing they were to throw their morals out the window when it came to defending one of their own. #istandwithbutts indeed. She hasn’t done anything illegal (at least that’s what the sources say), but the double standard being applied is pretty telling.

Why does he feel the need to mention her gender or where she’s at in the process of transitioning? I don’t care about any of that. She is words on a screen. That feels like an appeal to emotion. I have no time for anyone that level of intellectual dishonesty, and the fact the person setting this up did is extremely disappointing.

Two wrongs indeed don’t make a right. What’s wrong is wrong. One tends to lose sympathy when instead of putting the blame on the individuals who decide to dox and harasss they decide to use that experience to slander a group of thousands. Jay Allen’s mad? I’m mad too. If he didn’t go around blaming innocent people for what happened maybe some headway could be made on solving the issue. Allen has no interest in that and neither does Nyberg. If that’s not the case I look forward to hearing it from them (or through you if that’s the case). There’s no reason to have them on a panel. They want one discussion while we’re trying to have another. I’ve been living that 9 months now. It’s hard to get excited for seeing more of the same.

I’ll say this about Gamergaters who no longer wish to give the opposing side the benefit of the doubt or the courtesy of discussion: it’s understandable. We are largely not professionals, we’re just gamers. We came into this “culture war” very angry but very determined to be polite and turn the other cheek when struck. Every time we turned our cheek we didn’t just get slapped we got bludgeoned with a sledgehammer. Again and again and again and again and again. There is something admirable in taking abuse and not responding in kind but the thing that makes it so admirable is that so few are capable of it. We’re normal people and a lot of us can’t take it anymore. We refuse to be verbal punching bags for people who wish us all manner of nasty things including death. So are some Gamergaters hurling abuse back and unwilling to engage with detractors? Of course. Is it right? Not really, but it is understandable.

Sorry. I keep Sarah Butts and A_man_in_black on mute or blocked. They’ve both spent the entire time harassing, trolling, taking statements out of context in order to direct harassment against others; everything they could do to disrupt things.

Gamergate has denounced harassment, doxxing and threats countless times; when Sarah was doxxed on Baphomet (a board hosted on 8chan that I believe came from the closed /b/ board on 4 chan), Sarah wanted more than for us to say it was wrong; she wanted us to become their targets by going on their board and flooding it. She attempted to trick, along with Chris Kluwe, Mercedes Carerra into becoming a Baphomet target.

/Baph/ doxxes, but they are not GamerGate. In fact, they expressly hate gamergate; they just hate Sarah Butts and others more. They enjoy having Gamergate supporters blamed for their actions.

I can’t, and won’t, make statements about Sarah Butt’s personal life; I don’t know anything about it other than rumor and hearsay. She’s said her site was hacked; I believe her. I don’t know who, but I won’t take responsibility for it when I know nothing about it. I’ve heard another site of hers was shut down, causing her to lose income, but I also heard that was because it made money by distributing pirated copywrite materials. I’ve no evidence of either. I do know I’ve watched her constantly lie for 9 months, and I don’t trust anything she says without verification.

A man in black isn’t much better, but again, I intentionally know little about him.

Gamergate harassment patrol was, as far as I know, only a twitter thing, and it’s purpose was to report trolls posting doxx or threats, and it did so for those attacking gamergate or anti-gamergate, including women like Wu, Quinn, and Sarkeesian. Some tried to use it to silence statements they didn’t like rather than stop harassment (you can guess who) and eventually it stopped because 1) despite it being effective, Gamergate got the blame for the harassment anyway and 2) certain individuals like those above kept directing it to statements that weren’t harassment or threats under twitter’s rules in the amount of time spent investigating the account to see if it was harassment was just more wasted time.

There’s no doubt that Sarah and AMIB are Anti-GG. If they’re going to be on a panel to select Gamergate detractors for your panel, so be it. One thing I think should be absolutely certain is that Gamergate supporters not be involved in the selection of the ‘opposing’ panel. They should be free to select the individuals willing and able to attend that they feel represent their side of journalistic ethics issues in this ‘conflict’ without interference. I don’t think they can; they don’t really address the ethical issues other than to argue they don’t exist, despite being proven that they do, but it’s not my responsibility to guide them through that process, and it is my responsibility not to interfere.

I always decry harassment, threats, doxxing, and swatting. I shouldn’t need to do that every time it occurs to a random person on the internet as if it’s my responsibility; that’s what the gamers are dead articles tried to do. I am not part of Team Gamer: Internet Police. What happened to Sarah with doxxing is wrong, the same as it is to anyone else. I don’t support it in any way. I don’t know anyone who does.

But I’m not going to go after /baph/ over it; that’s a long and hard road full of personal peril for no payoff at the end. I’m not going to exchange places with her because she’s got their ire, I’m not going to say 8chan should be shut down, even if I don’t use the site, and I’m not going to wring my hands everytime someone asks a question someone else doesn’t like.

We all have limits to our patience, and both Sarah Butts and AMIB have wasted mine. I spent 6 months checking their BS and every time it was a lie. I’ve got other things to do with my life than to constantly apologize for things I didn’t do, that may not have even happened, for which they have no evidence that withstands any scrutiny, all while they’re trying to stab me in the back for trying to help stop their ‘harassment’.

If the price of Airplay is that I and other gamergate supporters take responsibility for the supposed threats and harassment that have occurred, despite not being involved, then it’s too high a price for me. I’m not responsible for what happens to her, and I’ve made many statements against it. Those will either suffice or they won’t.

I have on many occasions MONTHS AGO before gg really cared who butts was. At that time all we knew is that she was crazy she posted out of context tweets and claimed everything anyone says anywhere to represent ALL OF GAMERGATE. We pleaded for her to stop misrepresenting things we asked for dialogue instead of insults. For doing so i was dog pilled by amib. I was misquoted and shamed by mis nyberg. I was called a supporter of pedophilia for months. As soon as their is evidence that she is guilty of what she has balmed us for months for? why we have to apologise how dare we call someone with evidence against them being a pedophile a pedophile? Why we would be no where near as bad as she is because we at least have EVIDENCE. She accused us without evidence at all that any of us were actually connected directly with pedophilia. Why is us pointing out she is a pedophile with evidence somehow a crime but her and many of her supporters repeatingly describing us as isis pedophile nazi jew hating racist transphobic scum as perfectly fine? What planet am i on?

I personally pleaded with her to stop doing it as it was raising tensions. I pleaded with her for weeks and she ignored me. I tried dialogue with a_man_in_black and nyberg for weeks and only got insults ridicule in return. Nothing is good enough for these people no amount of good will changes a damn thing. No amount of warning was enough to lay down their arms. And because they went head first without holding back for a second … it is my fault. I am responsible for everything now…

“Convince my fellow journalists and your wounded opponents that they have nothing to fear by attending AirPlay.”

I’ve been around since August, and let me tell you – we have tried before to assuage concerns with condemnations, facts, evidence. Hundreds of times. Nothing is good enough. Trying to get fundamentalists like AMIB to consider maybe GG isn’t “100% hateful” and harassment and doxing may perhaps be carried out by third party agitators is an exercise in futility. There have been in depth analyses of hashtag content, proof of abusive accounts as false flags, and people have decried harassment repeatedly. It has gotten us nowhere, so please excuse anyone not jumping at the chance to waste more of their time.

Instead, let’s concentrate on the issues in gaming journalism. There have been hundreds (at least) of responses to you that have been intelligent, reasoned and more than civil focusing on such issues. Harassment can and should be dealt with by the relevant authorities. Turning the suffering of people into a kind of currency to use in disagreements is tasteless and unproductive.

Gamergate cannot sit, as the attacked party, with zero control over media narrative, and take the lies, doxxing, harassment of people like Sarah Nyborg and her supporters, and then be asked to tie both hands behind it’s back and not refute this, and refute the character of the attackers. She is a ringleader of smear, she will be pushed back against. She was not smeared by Gamergate in return, her own sordid words were simply used against her.

That is Ethics.

I agree if we are to legitimise people like Nyborg, then what is the point of SPJ anyway. We don’t have to apologise for what she has gotten herself into, she is a troll, and she got hit by other trolls.

There are plenty of innocent people hurt by this, the Youtuber who got a visit from the FBI after he was framed for sending an email to Sarkeesian for example, or the hate spilled at neutrals.

If accusing people of pedophilia support is harassment I have thousands of people who should apologise to me. Nyberg at least and probably amib as well. If spreadoing false rumours and hate is to be condemned and apologised for then amib and nyberg should apologise.

She wasn’t openly critical she was accusational confrontational lying constantly taking every thing out of context. Openly critical is the most absurd understatement i have ever heard.

1) GamerGate didn’t dox Sarah/Nick Nyburg. A board on 8chan called /baphoment/ did, after Sarah attempted to get all of 8chan shut down over false claims of hosting child pornography, because he was mad that the site was allowing GamerGate discussion on a different board. Nick knows this, but blames GamerGate, because he’s a dishonest ideologue who wants to shut us down at any cost.

2) There’s no “allegedly” about Nick’s pedophilia. He’s admitted to it outright in the logs, and argued for legalizing sex with children under 12. He also mentioned having his computer confiscated by police over it. This wasn’t gleaned from “doxing” or “hacking” either. These are publicly available logs and forum posts.

3) Nick has been trolling, stalking, harassing, and lying about us for months, relentlessly, accusing us of “terrorism,” “transphobia,” and various other crimes and moral infractions. Of COURSE we’re going to cite the revelation that this moralizing hypocrite has been a pedophile and advocate of sex with children the whole time against them to defend ourselves.

4) You saw AMIB’s Twitter performance yesterday. He tried to intimidate you for even being willing to TALK to us. He claimed that whistleblowing on journalistic collusion was unethical, and he said that aGGers couldn’t show up at the panel and defend their position on the grounds that they’re “in danger” from GGers. These are absurd excuses to deflect scrutiny and prevent anti-GamerGate from having to defend their accusations.

Why you would simply take his or Nyburg’s word on their claims of harassment is beyond me, given their dishonesty and penchant for trolling. Insist that they PROVE it.

Concerning SrhButts and AMIB, I encourage you to talk to them. They’ll probably be nice to you given your position, but they are vile hateful bullies, just read through their timelines. They’ve have never treated me with any kind of respect and are constantly antagonizing and attacking people.

These are the kind of people that will go up and repeatedly kick a bees nest, get stung by a wasp and start screaming for the eradication of bees.
^ yes I know the difference between bees and wasps, it’s intentional ^

In part GamerGate has gone on so long because people like SrhButts and AMIB (Also Brianna Wu, Anita Sarkeesian, Randy Harper, Izzy, Spacedad, PixelGoth, PixieJennie, Arthur Chu) can’t just BTFO and leave people alone. They make stupid baseless accusations and antagonize people, but the second anyone even politely responds, yeah, they’re totally the victims.

On #GamerGate Harassment Patrol, I still participate in it. Its not as prevalent as it use to be for a number of reasons.

1) When we called out and reported trolls, we were mocked and harassed by anti-GamerGate

I had serious run ins with PixieJennie, shrbutts and AMIB. After demonstrating I was reporting accounts I had to turn my phone off after it wouldn’t stop buzzing for 2 days because of their followers, who almost all have me blocked through the blockbot, kept tagging me into random conversations. Not a huge issue, but it was annoying and distracting.

2) All twitter does is ban/suspend the reported account. it takes less than 5 minutes to create a new account with a fake e-mail and get right back to it.

3) We were being expected to police not just ALL of twitter and other forms as well.

I had youtube, reddit and random forum comments reported to me. We had people reporting accounts to us that were randomly “harassing” a friend of a friend of a friend that wasn’t even remotely related to GamerGate. Sometimes on forums that weren’t even gaming related period. I don’t know if you’ve seen the internet these days, but there’s no way a few hundred, even a few thousand, people can police the entire internet. AND WE SHOULDN’T HAVE TO

4) Anti-GamerGate was abusing the system.

I’ve had people claim they were being harassed because someone wouldn’t stop tweeting at them and when I checked out the conversation it was them continuously tweeting at someone else who was responding, pretty politely I might add. Then they’d claim the conversation was harassment because the person they were talking to wouldn’t stop disagreeing with them. They weren’t just asking us to report “harassment” they were asking us to censor people they didn’t like talking to, instead of, you know, just not talking to them.

5) Members of the harassment patrol became targets

I can’t remember the name of the account, it was banned long ago for targeted harassment, but when someone tweeted out to harassment patrol the account would list their name and anti-GamerGate would mass report the listed account to have them banned.

WHY WOULD ANYONE PARTICIPATE!

Anti-GamerGate is an organized troll group that, despite what they say, is harassing people. Everything they accuse GamerGate of doing there’s evidence of them doing in spades.

I continue to be happy about the steps forward that are made and this too is a step forward.

I think it would be great that either sarah nyberg or a man in black would attend these kind of meetings. My previous encounters with either have not been positive, with both taking my words out of context and using it as proof of me being a hateful person part of a hateful movement.

I was at good terms with amib initially. He kept speaking up about the harassment that gamergate condoned, in his mind.

The thing is, I knew very little about journalism and media and have been reading and learning steadily for the last 6 months. I’ve come to understand that I knew very little about media first and now through airplay, I’m learning that I didn’t know as much about journalist ethics as I thought. So I’m reading, I’m learning.

The fact that I have these negative experiences with these individuals and that I intuitively believe them to be wrong, is precisely why I would want to see them in a debate and/or discussion.

To either learn what parts I’m missing, misunderstanding or for them to learn what parts they’re missing or misunderstanding.

—

Is there a seedy side of gamergate? It’s a subject I myself and other gamergate supporters are very defensive about.

Gamergate was initially a flag to rally behind, an ideal. Like all ideals, it’s made up of people and therefor, imperfect. There is no way to know if harassment and/or threats does come from gamergate supporters, unless these people are discovered and apprehended by police, something I and I believe, many other gamergate supporters would support.

In absence of evidence, gamergate has been blaimed repeatedly though, even for cases where there was no logical connection to gamergate, such as the massacre threatening anti-feminist letter that was sent to Utah State University, regarding anita sarkeesian.

—

The anti-harassment patrol, which I was part of, stopped not long after gamergate had discovered someone posting death threats toward anita sarkeesian, Mateus Prado Sousa working for blog celebrinando. This was reported to the FBI and local brazilian police, but in absence of action from anita sarkeesian, no further action could be taken.

Despite this success in exposing harassment and threats of violence, nobody from anti-gamergate has taken the smallest step of reconcilliation towards gamergate supporters as a result of that. In fact, there was an article that seemed to have been written specifically to say that gamergate is still bad:

Anti-gamergate (despite their denial of being such and instead always argumentatively claiming “there’s only gamergate and everybody else”)

Anti-gamergate in each of my encounters have rarely brought up sources for their claims, frequently been caught lying and deceiving to the point that I rarely bother to research the claims that are made by those who are anti-gamergate.
—

I really really really want the dialogue to happen, but past events have made me wary, cautious and not very trusting. So yes, I’ll do everything in my power to support this moving forward and support the dialogue to happen.

I’ll say something that other gamergate supporters have said and repeated in the past: We condemn harassment. We condemn doxxing. We want whoever is responsible for these actions to be brought to justice.

However this argument is frequently unfairly used to prevent gamergate supporters any chance to talk about the real issues. I have no problem with you talking to and investigating claims made by anti-gamergate. I have no problem with you inviting them to the table. But please don’t let them use claims of harassment as a diversion tactic. When anti-gamergate writings have frequently reported that ONLY gamergate supporters harass, that all of gamergate are trolls, that’s the moment they fed the trolls.

Trolls care only for mayhem and here they were able to both cause mayhem for people wanting journalistic ethics in game journalism and the press that tried to sidestep any real responsibility and accountability. Harassing either side was sure to receive widespread notoriety.

For an event such as this, I’d like to see someone like David Jaffe participate. He’s not “neutral”, “pro-GG” or “anti-gamer” at all. He seems to think that everyone is being stupid, and doesn’t come off as particularly spiteful when talking about it.

Of course, I don’t see why the SPJ would even need an event such as this. Being a society of professional journalists, shouldn’t you already know that Gawker is horrible? Or that the gaming “press” by and large is of the same mindset? IMNSHO, this should already be a given, and SPJ should concern itself with how the mainstream media, i.e. outlets that don’t just hire a bunch of couch surfers (literally or figuratively), are swallowing gawkeresque narratives wholesale.

Jounralists themselves have nothing to fear nothing at all. We have nothing to say we do not harass people. We only investigated people like nyberg after 4months of daily insults lies and harassment. Since the debate is 4 months away it is literally impossible to reach that state within the alloted time available. Even after investigating her we didn’t spread her dox. We found information but didn’t list her phone number or address.

If someone is harassing you for months don’t you at some point think.. maybe i should find out why?
That is all it was.

1)When she entered into the GamerGate controversy, she claimed that she was just trying to expose harassment. Fair enough. But when people were being harassed by Anti-GG and pro-GG ppl came to her to condemn her actions, it fell on deaf ears.

2) She is very disingenuous. She became famous for cyber-stalking #GamerGate on twitter, 8chan, Reddit, and YouTube to find any comment she could spin to smear GG. For example, say you as an individual said something jokingly to another person, it would be screencapped as “#GamerGate is about misogyny” or “#GamerGate supports [insert vile accusation]. I’ve personally been screencapped by her at least 3 times for comments taken out of context.

3) Sarah Nyberg was also part of a scheme to link #GamerGate to pedophila/Child Porn when an Anti-GG person posted CP on a 8chan thread, which Sarah constantly used to promote that GG condones pedophila. (But when she was Doxed and hacked by anons, revealing that she indeed was into pedophila, GG was justified in their anger that someone who engages into those desires herself was trying to use it to smear GG.

4) Sarah has been one of the main barriers to actual dialogue because she only wants to smear GG and give it no chance or platform to defend itself (even prior to her harassment). She’s gained thousands of followers because she is the propagandist of Anti-GG, which is why Chris Kluwe invoked her in his debate with Mercedes Carrera.

Do I support her harassment? No. Was it wrong? Yes. Do I feel sympathy for her? Absolutely not. I can respect people who disagree or even hate GamerGate but I can never respect someone who is very dishonest and seeks to smear me and everyone’s character in #GamerGate for her quest for acceptance and e-celebrity. I honestly believe if it weren’t for people like her or A_Man_in_Black, another very deceptive person, we would be closer to a resolution.

You can ask us not to condone harassment, but to ask us to pretend that she’s just some innocent person who was terrorized by the infamous internet boogeyman called #GamerGate will not happen.

On Nyberg: My interactions with her have been limited, boiling down to naught but a comment she left on a YouTube video of mine. (That comment erupted into a bit of a flame war between two viewers of opposite opinions. I only stepped in to stop it once I realized it had just boiled down to the two of them hurling insults at one another.)

However, my opinion on the matter is that she tends to lack self-awareness in her accusations, and tends to paint the entirety of GamerGate with a broad brush. In one moment, she’s say, “All of GamerGate does X.” and the very next she’ll say, “I wouldn’t generalize people!”

So I opted instead to block her on social media. She’s really rather all over the place. I’m of the opinion that she draws the ire of trolls because they’re aware she’s a beacon. They know that by attacking her, word will get out, because it inevitably comes with a drama storm.

There are instances of confirmed pro-GG people being critical of her, rude, snarky, and in some cases outing her as trans. But I find it rather telling that, at least in my circles, the vast majority of us *still* refer to her as *her.*

As for A Man in Black, I’ve had one interaction that I can remember. This was last year sometime, when in response to a man sending a picture threatening violence against GG, I opined that he could ‘bring it all he wants’ because I have over a decade of experience working in private & personal security. AMIB found my tweet, quoted it, and used it as ‘proof’ that GamerGate was full of ‘Internet Tough Guys.’ I felt this was an unfair assessment as I had never even remotely threatened violence, but spoke out in a response to a threat of violence. (One of MANY over the past 9 months.)

Even to that degree, I looked at his tweets, realized I was dealing with another slightly unhinged, ‘beacon’ of anti-GG, and blocked him without responding directly to him.

It goes without saying that I, and the people in my circle in GG abhor threats, violence and harassment. But that doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy taking the piss out of them, and oftentimes even attempting to respectfully argue.

In both cases, this is being framed as ‘harassment’ by these ‘beacons’ and broadcast out as such. And out it goes over the internet.

Are some of these people legitimately being harassed? Absolutely.

Is it supporters of GamerGate who are doing it? It’s possible. I’m of the opinion that if there are GG supporters doing this, they’re likely those among us who are emotionally or psychologically unstable.

Is it third-party trolls? I feel this is more likely. In my opinion, anyone mature who legitimately cares about GamerGate’s goals within the games industry isn’t stupid enough to pull those kinds of tactics, because they know it sheds a poor light on us, and there exist those out there who’s sole purpose in life is to ‘fuck some shit up.’

Ask any GG supporter whether or not s/he feels the goals of GG should be taken seriously, and I can almost guarantee a yes answer. Then ask them if they think harassment of critics helps or harms GG.

We wouldn’t be meeting up in public en masse if we believed there was anything to the idea we were a hate movement.

I would like to comment on this, but more broadly than simply creating a laundry list of toxic incidents. I’d like to give some background.

After GamerGate began, back at the end of August, and Zoe Quinn had tweeted unsubstantiated allegations related to Gamergate, the tag was inundated with people who would go on to defend her. SRHButts and A Man In Black were two of these people. Two of many. Others, of course, included prominent gaming journalists and bloggers. All of them, to a man, tweeted out unsubstantiated allegations, which furthered the caricature of GamerGate as ISIS (I say that literally. We were literally called ISIS, KKK, etc., and this was done by people with an audience).

Not a day would go by without another article repeating allegations as fact, with no proof at all. Allegations which would be libellous if levelled at a person. One of the most notorious examples was when some sort of Internet prankster claimed to have street raced Brianna Wu, claiming he had tried to kill her. This, after being put through the clickbait generator, became ‘ARMED GAMERGATER MAKES ATTEMPT ON BRIANNA WU’S LIFE’ or headlines to that effect on Buzzfeed and Gawker, among others. Another incident was when an admitted troll was interviewed by Buzzfeed over direct message on Twitter: the troll claimed to be a member of Gamergate who was intent on harassing all minorities out of gaming with the rest of the movement. When the obvious truth came to light, both stories were given something of a correction. These are only the explicit examples. All of this is still available to see, if you should wish to.

That’s all important context because it is one of the most important direct causes of the escalations we have seen in gamergate – between pro and anti. These stories, which readers would simply take as truth, demonised Gamergate advocates. It dehumanised us. It made us people who had to be dealt with for the good of others (you’ll find people have tweeted words to that effect). And so we saw. One person wrote a startling manifesto on how, for the good of women, we must all be rounded up and put in death camps. This wasn’t an anonymous post and was not written in jest. More still, endless attacks on our character, and the odd threat of violence. All the while being told we’re violent harassers on a crusade to get women out of gaming.

SRHButts and A Man in Black worked as de facto propagandists. They would screen grab tweets on the hashtag, totally decontextualise them, and use them as evidence that we are indeed evil incarnate. This reinforced the notion that our advocates had to be ‘dealt with’, and so the social justice movement would continue to berate us. In response to the constant provocations, many in GamerGate would argue back and forth with these people. Often uncivilly, on both sides. But that’s the Internet. And in no mind could *that* be considered harassment.

However. During all of this, as Brianna Wu started baiting the Chan crowd, and drawing attention to the drama by going on all the mainstream media. Dedicated third party troll groups then appeared. The SPJ have witnessed one of them – on the tag. The ‘Ayy Team’. But there were more, too.

As Zoe Quin had been involved with these people long before GamerGate, they already had an interest in the drama, and indeed, she had been doxxed just before Gamergate really started. Because that’s the thing. These known personalities have *a lot* of enemies on the Internet. People entirely outside of Gamergate. Check it up. They’ve been discussing their online harassment for years. So is it really any surprise, when suddenly they were given huge media attention, that their trolls continued warring against them?

Both Gamergate and anti-Gamergate are nothing compared to these troll groups. If there ever was a ‘dark web’, it is where they reside. The difference between pro and anti GG, is that we know not to give them attention, whereas antis seem to give them as much as possible. This is like using a oujia board at a seance. You’re going to summon a poltergeist.

These people believe Gamergate is as sanctimonious as the ‘Social Justice Warriors’ (primarily because of our anti-harassment movement [and our admonishing anyone on our fringes who would harass] – which, by the way, disbanded because they themselves came under a volley of abuse from AntiGG). And they are responsible for 90% of the doxxings and death threats on both sides. Their whole raison d’être is to cause chaos, because that’s what they enjoy. They do so by tricking the media, because it gets them maximum attention. One way to get the media’s attention was by threatening Brianna Wu, another was the bomb threat (neither of which do I believe for a single second were credible). Someone uploaded a picture of a photograph of me which they had ejaculated on, the same happened to someone who used to be a loud voice in GG – until she too was doxxed by third party trolls.

The trouble is. Either AntiGG truly are unaware of these people (which I find impossible to believe) or they conveniently forget about them, in order to blame us, their opposition, and continue the narrative. In fairness, I believe once or twice, we too have conveniently blamed trolls’ actions on AntiGG. But whilst this continues, these people will be allowed to operate in the shadows, effectively framing others for their own actions. I was really heartened to hear the SPJ wanted to learn how to deal with trolls, because in this controversy, their are documented, provable cases of trolling which exemplify the tactics they use. But at the end of the day, the truth of it is that it’s the media who allow them to cast such a terrible shadow. It’s unfortunate David Auerbach refused to come to the panel, because apart from being one of the best tech culture writers in the world, he is one of the only people to have addressed the existence of these dedicated troll groups.

But the point of this post is that

HARASSMENT IS WRONG
DOXXING IS WRONG

Regardless of who it happens to. And having been heavily involved with Gamergate from the start, I already know that the overwhelming majority of people in GG feel the same.

Airplay is of ridiculous importance to gamergate. We take no part in Encyclopedia Dramatica or Baphomet (the message board that doxxed Sarah). I was browsing baphomet yesterday and they were even making fun of “gator-fags” (hey that’s us!) because we were getting blamed.

As the original gamergate slogan said, “We stand for ethics in journalism, we condemn any form of harrassment”, had to paraphrase since I haven’t seen the image in a while. I think most GGers will support this statement and act by it.

She admitted on her PUBLIC logs, all her pedophile status, her message board was public. She was told by her community to STOP soliciting underage pictures and cyber sex with kids.

This is not harassment, this does not need to be defended by ANYONE, particularly when members of /gamergate/ board were being called pedophile supporters for posting on 8chan, which does NOT host child porn. It allows free speech, and legal material, yes we may not like it but it is a FREE SPEECH board, end of story.

Her harrasment came at the hands of a troll board, in which she herself posted. I won’t apologise for that, I’ll say it is wrong, childish and was ammo used AGAINST gamergate.

Ok, so let me show you a few things Mark because let me show you on what happens when we fight trolls or do good deeds:

First two

Anita Sarkessian gets a death threat and people look into it and are suspicious, she then gets sent child porn from a troll and shows the name of this guy.
People go from being skeptical to going up in arms and everyone on /v/ 4chan and #GamerGate report the pedophile.

So that in itself is pretty bad right? Well how about we have someone who was “criticizing us” as in cherry picking quotes and then saying “All of #GamerGate is like this one person, it’s ok to hate them.”
@_icze4r here see this person wanting to kill themselves and tweets out a helpline to them.

And what happens? She gets blamed for “Flooding Gay and Trans suicide hotlines.”

We can do no right with our critics John.

Now is the information valid to the #GamerGate discussion? No, not really. Do I support it? No.

Will I stop it? Call it out?

Well it’s a bit to late for that and nothing will come out of it even if I did. I’m a nobody Mark, why would a bunch of people who hate Sarah stop because some random guy on the internet told them not to, in fact, it’ll have the OPPOSITE effect “Oh this info is going to do some REAL damage, lets get it out there!”

Even this post has done nothing but help these trolls Mark, you’ve just put a huge spotlight on a VERY sensitive topic, I hope you asked Sarah before hand and if so…why the hell would she want this info to go public?

There is a very good reason we follow the “Don’t feed the trolls” moto Mark and you just gave them a three course meal and a breath mint.

What isn’t reported on, is why our critics WORK with the third party trolls:

It’s not much proof but here is a chat room, you might see one of those names turn up quite allot in these imgurs.

Here is another critic of GamerGate working with troll groups:

Odd isn’t it Mark? Two women, both in the media who are adamantly against trolling and harassment, shown to work WITH people who take joy in doing them, stranger still, they all do it by using #GamerGate why hasn’t this been adressed if we’re so concerned with death threats and harassment?
Why isn’t the media calling out troll groups we can name but will gladly use #GamerGate as a scape goat?

I hope you read these Mark, no one will address these, despite it being in the news and being the talking point for mainstream media, none of these have been asked, ever.

Btw, GGers tried to “reach out” to and reason with Nyburg and AMIB for months. Everyone has given up on it, because both of those individuals have amply demonstrated that they are pathologically dishonest demagogues who never operate in good faith. Any such attempts are thrown back in the face of the person attempting it, and used to attack them and force them to submit and admit to badthink, in Orwellian style. Most everyone has learned their lesson by now.

What a surprise that yet again the discussion is derailed to the ‘harassment’ track. Why is a discussion about ethics in journalism concerned with a few online professional victims/provocateurs? I have never engaged in social media until last September, and even I know what these people do is despicable and underhanded. Nyberg incites hatred from every corner of the internet, and any backlash received is blamed on GamerGate even if the person he quotes does not have a clue what GamerGate is about.

I for one, refuse to apologize for actions I did not do. I am sick and tired of having to repeat the same mantra over and over and still be labelled as part of a hate group and every other vile name in the book, it does no good other than distract from the message we want the public to hear, ETHICS. If you choose to shut it down, I will respect your choice, but I will not be led around by the nose for you to do it.

Rum ‘N Coke: “Look, I’m not going to apologize on behalf of anyone else. And I think it’s fair to say that not many else will. However, yes, anyone who doxes or harasses anyone is a terrible person and doesn’t deserve to be a part of the conversation. That goes without saying I think.

People will criticize you for talking to AMIB and Butts because of the kind of vitriol they’ve been slinging around. But it will be the same kind of criticism from aGG for talking to GG. There’s a lot of bad blood on both sides, and I commend you for calling GG on it. My hope is that you can convince both sides to stop screaming about past grievances and just TALK for a day.

Because after 8 months, that really hasn’t happened yet.”

This summarizes my own thoughts more or less. The only addition I would like to give is that from my won understanding, part of what lead to the end of the Anti-Harassment patrol was that even when they did help and outed who was responsible GG and even they were blamed for it anyway. A particular case involving Brianna Wu comes to mind but I can’t remember the specifics of it.

When someone hits you you hit them back. Don’t give me the “Turn the other cheek” hogwash. These people claiming they are harassed are provoking responses DELIBERATELY, usually for profit. Their entire narrative is a con. You are a sucker if you believe it. It’s really that simple.

While I have never personally harassed anyone I have no sympathy for people like Nyberg (and some of the other Who’s who of who’s) if they get what they deserve. By their own demented logic that is what they call JUSTICE.

Regarding Sarah Nyberg. This is my very subjective view of her. Ever since she got involved with the whole story, her whole job has been to take tweets out of context and portray them as saying something they aren’t. The writers of these tweets, along with the people seeing the omission of context, naturally take offense to this mischaracterization and react. On twitter there is no obligation to being nice, and in general there is no obligation to being nice if somebody mischaracterizes what you say, especially when they can’t show the decency of acknowledging you when you point out that they took what you said out of context.

I cannot justify doxxing, although a lot of the information that came out recently isn’t at all related to that, just investigating an online persona and delving into her past online.

However, having been around #Gamergate since it began, and reactivating my twitter account in september of last year, it really doesn’t seem like Sarah is worthy of being taken seriously. On both sides the great majority of people simply are not worthy of a debate of this magnitude, which is the reason why there needs to be a careful selection process. For the past months, she’s shown her lack of integrity and an inability to work within context. I wish sounded less like an attack on her credibility, but it has been months of her unbearable behavior.

That said, doxxing is indefensible. On the other hand, the recent investigation in her past was purely on her as an online persona, it had nothing to do with outing her or exposing her real-life personality and I can’t condemn it. People are free to do that.

That’s my opinion on the topic of srhbutts. My interest isn’t only that #gamergate wins the debate, but that it is a good debate, worthy of watching as well. I will be a spectator, after all. With a personal bias. I wish there’s little semantics wars and watching for slips of the tongue from both sides, and more focus on battling of ideas and actual positions.

There is no point discussing #GamerGate in the context of harassment. Both sides agree harassment, threats and bullying should not occur so it isn’t a topic which is up for debate.

I would highly recommend that besides a disclaimer at the start of the discussion and beyond refraining from having any panelists who will be disrespectful to the other panelsts and focus on the issues at hand.

I have to wonder (separating the statement from addressing the group as a whole) what makes you think pro-gamergaters despise Nyberg or MiB?

In your discussion with MiB you stated he came away still thinking gamergate is 100% abusive, do you honestly believe anything at this point will actually change the minds of those who have firmly cemented a viewpoint?

Earlier today I in earnest offered someone the usernames of every account i had ever used while in access to the internet in order to show that not everyone concerned about ethics was a horrid abuser, the result? Blamed for the harassment of several people by association, called a troll, blocked and then tweeted about from behind a block wall, I offered my lifes history to prove them wrong, these people have already made their minds up in regards to anyone that would be connected to gamergate and when presented with the opportunity to be proven wrong dig their heads into the sand

So I ask you, how do you propose one changes the minds of these people?

Ben Garrison, Actually nyberg was hacked by lizard squad I believe, because Nyberg had claimed the public logs were faked, and someone in revenge for trying to take down 8chan went into his computer or server and downloaded all the logs saved there, and that’s where the pedophila and bestiality posts were confirmed.

I’ve watched from within the rank and file, and I peruse the hashtag fairly often. So take this as just my experience with them. At this point I do not like either of them very much, but here are my thoughts.

In regards to Ms. Nyberg,

Many of my first and subsequent encounters are coming across posts/tweets where she a tweet, takes the entire conversation out of context, and misframes it to libel/say awful things. At first, many people tried correcting her and explaining, but it was either ignored or the explanation was never good enough. And this continued on and on and on for months despite trying to reason with her. Eventually people did just get fed up and stop trying to meaningfully engage with her. When IRC logs and information came out that she harbors pedophilic tendicies, some people really wanted to be vindicated that she was a terrible person and to strawman the opposition into all being terrible people (considering a lot of posts wishing murder on us, like Geordie Tait’s rant if you have not seen it. I think that was the breaking point for a lot of people on meaningfully engaging with the opposition.) I personally did not believe she was one, and decried it when I saw it. From other posts on forums she made and such as more information revealed itself, I am fairly sure police/social workers know about her, so I am content to leave it at that.

In regards to A Man In Black,

Much like Ms Nyberg, I encountered him through many posts where he was claiming things that were not factually true, or taking things out of context to attack us. A lot of attempts were made at first to correct him with sources and explain to him context, but he too just ignored them (either intentionally misrepresenting statements or not accepting sources because of GG taint, and dismissed such claims as sea-lioning) and continued the attacks. Most of us by now, like Ms Nyberg, are also just frustrated beyond belief and have stopped meaningfully engaging him after months of trying. I admit to not knowing as much about his personal life, but if what he claims is true I can understand his motivations a bit more. However, the constant attacks from him have really worn GG’s patience down with him as well, and I admit to making a snipe at him once. I’ll send a tweet to him apologizing for that snipe afterwards.

In regards to Ralph Retort,

I, and many other in GG, do not like him, as we see him as the type of yellow journalism we are fighting against. He also frequently makes articles from flimsy links and unclear sources, and also makes a lot of hit pieces which I personally do not like at all. I would prefer if he were not in the movement, as he is a ready example of what people can point to about not liking GG, but I accept his help in fighting for journalistic ethics, even though he may not follow them himself (though I wish he did).

In regards to Encyclopedia Dramatica,

If you know about ED, great. But if not, it’s basicallly the old guard of Anonymous, back when they were truly feared, exposing people’s history and skeletons for lulz. I do not like it hosts tons of private information about individuals, and how it sometimes makes its rounds on twitter, but they are not affiliatted with GG in any sense. They just used this opportunity to get more lulz-worthy articles. They, like /Baphomet/ (8chan version of /b/, full of doxxing and hackers) are often told are with GG but are not in actuallity. There have been many times where GG has been asked to denounce them and cast them out, without really understanding that they are not affiliated with us. We decry the actions they do, but otherwise leave them alone because they leave us alone. We know a hornet’s nest when we see one, and are not going to kick it.

In regards to the GamerGate Harrassment Patrol,

I was actually a part of it for a while. The goal was to report any harrassment (either PGG or AGG), to try and dispel the notion that GG is a hate group and actually fighting for ethics. However, many vocal AGG voices took the name to mean that they would cause harrassment, or gave impossible demands of perfection (i.e. “I was harrassed, why didn’t you report this one?” or “this guy didn’t use the tag, but he is still GG. Report him”). After 2 or so months of reporting, and the tune did not change, most people agreed to basically move it underground and keep patrolling individually, rather than as an organized patrol. I think we should have kept it going officially, but continuous misrepresentation killed morale.

In regards to GG Criticisms,

Here are the criticisms I would make of GG.
1) We do not listen to some people’s criticisms based on who they come from (if AGG), or treat them as far more sinister than they are. While I can understand why this is, as people are tired of trying to have good faith arguments after 9 months of every attempt almost universally being shot down, we do definitely need to be more self-critical.
2) We can get too mean in regards to AGG figureheads. Again, after being called every hateful libelous thing under the sun for 9 months, people have not much empathy left to restrain some mean things slipping out.
3) We are a little too protective of our own figureheads. see above reasoning why.
4) Asking for linked proof of definite GG involvement. This is ok in theory, but it changes based on situation, some want the tag to be included in any mean tweets, some want accounts longer than X time, or accounts with more than X followers. But given how easy it is to false flag us, it has changed to “Show me the KiA reddit thread or the 8ch /gamergatehq/ thread.
5) People in general are worn down and frustrated and tired of being abused for so long, and need a break (I mean, we’re even blamed for future sexism on Mars and why Mad Max is bad and even why a college applicant didn’t get in. We have become a scapegoat to literally everyone, and it annoys us to no end). Everyone in this is on frayed nerves, and everyone keeps poking the others buttons and constantly setting them off. It’s a constant cycle of tension because people can’t leave each other alone. Honestly, I’d suggest maybe shutting down KiA or /gamergatehq/ for a day or three for everyone to cool off and heal. Almost everyone wants this to end and go back to playing video games how they used to be.

Sarah Nyberg or Sarah Butts however this particular person prefers to go by has attempted to, and gone out of their way for a little over 6 months to my knowledge to call every single supporter of #GamerGate a supporter of child pornography.

To this extent some of her own “Justice Inclined” followers accused me at several times of being a direct distributor.

I entirely agree with you sir, two wrongs do not make a right, yet this is a person who has gone out of their way to deliberately harm people long before they were under any risk of being harmed themselves.

You want all of #GamerGate to stand by Sarah Butts, a person who has called ALL OF THEM supporters of pedophilia, terrorists, and tried to accuse them of all manner of things and then support them when something they posted publicly came to light in a different public forum?

I have no clue if she has that information posted elsewhere on the Internet and uses them under like names where they could have been more easily found.

However this person and or persons are not people who can call #GamerGate a hate group, while they actively tried to get us all arrested for crimes we not only never committed but crimes we can prove we never committed.

Do you know why it is so hard for #GamerGate to select a committee? We don’t want to be judged as a whole for all their actions. We don’t want to be declared guilty of their crimes, for their actions when chosen to represent our argument.

You are willing to hold us accountable to the actions of a few? How about the actions of A Man In Black and Sarah Butts, who have attempted to directly harm and create legal issues, and personal safety issues for thousands of innocent people.

I suppose some random person in #GamerGate A Man In Green or @A_Man_In_Green_ the article couldn’t even get the twitter handle right despite trying to slander his name had a right to be painted as a target who feared so heavily for his life as there were race riots going on in his area, that he was driven to attempting suicide twice.

All mind you, by the word of a handful of trolls without any evidence to prove their claims real.

What evidence has Sarah Butts supplied you to suggest the information found about her was not made publicly available of her own accord?

Proponent of #GamerGate here. I’m really invested in this movement/consumer revolt/whatever the fuck you’d like to call it.

I condemn any and all harassment aimed from and at anyone.

Do I think #GamerGate harasses people? Well, the first thing to always remember when discussing internet harassment is this: Can we find out who the harasser is. If we can’t, then we have no way of knowing where the harassment is coming from.

Now, many supporters of #GamerGate have received harassment. Milo Yiannopolous received a syringe with an unknown substance in it and a dead animal in the mail. If you’d use the same logic of people who attribute harassment of #GamerGate opponents to #GamerGate proponents, then it’d only follow to say that Milo received these atrocious things from opponents of #GamerGate. But I don’t necessarily believe that, because there’s no way to prove it. It’s possible that opponents of #GamerGate would do it, but since it’s difficult to track the people behind these acts, I don’t assume that it was them.

Because that would be disingenuous.

Moving on – there are also people who use the #GamerGate hashtag but don’t care about the cause. There are troll groups (such as GNAA) who enjoy stirring up shit and who have a problem with anyone who they see as taking themselves too seriously, so they see #GamerGate and think, how can I stir up shit? Well, I know that #GamerGate would like to be seen as legitimate. How can I prevent this? Well, I can pretend to support it and go on to harass people.

Some harassers who used the #GamerGate tag were found to have never used the tag before the time of the harassment. This leads me to think that they were just exploiting the situation for, as they say on the Internet, the lulz (and fuck the lulz, seriously. Again, I contend that harassment is never okay and that we should try our hardest to track the offenders).

I’m not saying that no supporters of #GamerGate harass people, but it’s very, very important to look into these instances and make sure that the harassers are actually the people we’re labeling them as. As I said before, the same goes for harassment aimed at #GamerGate – it’s important to look into those instances as well.

But what you’ll find, as far as I’m aware, is that the only coverage of harassment coveed by the overwhelming majority of media covering #GamerGate concerns the harassment aimed at opponents of #GamerGate. Harassment and/or doxing of Milo Yiannopolous, Lizzy Finnegan, Mike Cernovich, Brandon Morse, and many others have seen barely any coverage if any at all.

I don’t suggest that the coverage of harassment on two sides of a conflict should always be 50/50. I suggest that since the ratio is more like 95/5 (if I were to be generous), it shows that there is an orchestrated attempt by the vast majority of media outlets covering #GamerGate to paint the situation in a light that is not very consistent with reality.

#GamerGate just received a fucking bomb threat at their first U.S. event, ‘GGinDC’. There are people who hate #GamerGate so much they don’t have a problem with doing that to an event of around 250-300 people. Be it for the lulz, for a twisted sense of vigilante justice, for any reason. It’s inexcusable. But about 14 websites, many pronents of #GamerGate, covered the story. Meanwhile, things that happen to opponents of #GamerGate are blown up to many, many news outlets.

It’s also interesting to note that there are opponents of #GamerGate who are making sure to note that it’s disingenuous to assume that the perpetrator of the GGinDC was an opponent of #GamerGate. They didn’t do this when it was people on their side receiving harassment.

There is a narrative being told. The situation is being framed very carefully in a way that is not consistent with reality. People are blindly believing the media instead of actually looking into what’s going on.

I’d like to close with a reminder that I don’t fucking endorse harassment. Holy shit, I don’t endorse harassment.

According to opponents of #GamerGate, they should be announcing that they don;t endorse harassment right about now.

I really, really want Airplay to happen. Don’t let people tell you things that aren’t necessarily true. Do your research. #GamerGate, as I’ve come to know it, is an incredibly accepting group of individuals who believe in transparency and take issue with extremist ideologies that lead to nontransparency. I don’t see people in #GamerGate harass others. I see them passionately argue – and sometimes get angry – but not harass.

Because at this point we’re almost nine months in. And the number one thing #GamerGate knows by now is that there are people out there, waiting for something they can label as harassment from #GamerGate. Proponents of #GamerGate understand that harassing others would only hurt the cause, not help it. No one wants to fuck up their cause. People want their cause to come out on top.

I’m not afraid to admit there are some VERY SEEDY elements to Gamergate supporters. I was blocked by a very vocal one yesterday for daring to call him out on stealing infographics from 8chan, photoshopping them to reflect his pesonal wanting of a ”holy war” against SJWs and all of journalism itself.

I proceeded to tell the guy he had no business ‘leading’ gamergate people on a wacky Don Quixote crusade against every single SJW scandal that came across the web and daring to ask that we need to focus on improving projects like #OpDeepfreeze’s website.

My criticism and debate of this topic earned me a block. Been friendly with the guy for the whole time I’ve been talking Gamergate online for past 9 months.
Yes we have radicals, yes we have extremists, yes we have assholes that dox ,harass, and threaten SJWs, but they don’t represent the majority. I’m not denying they exist.

The only problem I have is there seems to be a contingent of folks who are trying to make Gamergate their personal army and have identified with the hashtag as an identity itself when they tag wasn’t attacked on Aug 28th 2014, gamers were.

Plus there is a contingent of people who want to get rid of ”toxic chan culture” withing Gamergate itself when Gamergate was started and birthed from chans.

The guy who wrote that ran the gamergate.me site from the beginning and the other guy and him stepped down after it started conflicting with IRL things and for some reason Gamergate ”supporters” often would go after the two of them with tons of venom for daring to be what they were to begin with which are shitposters on chans.

I will never forget the roots of Gamergate and where it all started. On chans. The infodigs, the expose’s, the grassroots beginning of this entire movement started on the fucking chan boards and for some reason people want to conveniently forget about them and brush them off like Anon didn’t even exist.

It’s unfair, it’s sad, and I can’t get behind radical tactics like blocking allies who were there from the start.
Thanks for your time and looking forward to this podcast thing

I would be gutted if airplay was halted because of her. the fact that someone who is so unfathomable mentally unstable is even being entertained in this discussion is ludicrous.
To even bring a modicum of focus onto her “victimhood” is exactly what she wants. her disingenuous nature knows know bounds.

Nybergs logs just reveal that person’s character, going to the police is probably out of the question at this point because of chain of evidence issues, and the fact that other than the persons tendencies, we don’t have a proven victim, which isn’t something to complain about.
But its brought up as an issue of hypocrisy with anti gamergate which makes judgments from its moral high horse of purity, claiming gamergate should distance itself from this or that person for the wrong stance on some political issue when they harbor someone with pedophilic tendencies in their group, and these things have been known for quite a while now, but they exhibit a selective blindness, as they do to all things. If someone not even proven to be affiliated with gamergate does something bad, then everyone is bad and rotten to the core, but somehow,they harbor a pedophile, and they don’t realize how hypocritical that makes them look.
You see, the thing is much of gamergate goes back to chan culture, which is about being anonymous,when identity politics are removed, it becomes about ideas. The sjw’s have the entirely opposite perspective, they don’t even know how to assess what is said until they know your skin color and gender/sexual orientation. So the true risk of doxing and attacks tends to be from sjw’s, from rad fems, because as much as they judge others, they have created an echo chamber of grievance and perpetual victimhood where they aren’t able to rationally assess or police their own behavior. Its why feminists went straight to vandalism over Protein world posters, without shame, because that is how self righteous they are, they went from that to a bomb threat. No different with GGinDC, and the recent defacing of the WW2 memorial after the uk elections, they are prone to extremism, because the echo chamber of fear they have created removes all rational restraint.
And you see this hypocrisy in their language.
Arthur Chu just goes around swearing up a stormhttps://archive.is/9nj1q

And these are the same types who will jump down others throats over the smallest of language infractions. If you use the wrong pronoun, you might as well be a nazi to them. They will wail all day long about the nasty messages and threats they get, but really, they themselves do this without limit.

Its this sjw mentality of hypocrisy which makes them so prone to ethical infractions, because when it comes down to it, their ethos is that the ends always justifies the means.
As Arthur said, he had to learn to mind kill himself, they radicalize themselves to immunize themselves against reason so they can fight the “good fight”, without silly things like consciences or reason getting in the way.

Just the other day
Another bit from Anna Anthropy of the sjw clique, if that had been said to her, it would be a trophy. Its a disingenuous game they play, a well worn play
As that guy demonstrates as well, they deliberately instigate to get the reactions they desire, because frankly they don’t have a case otherwise.
Mykeru in his numerous videos which documented the same kind of sjw attack against atheism explained their threat narrative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_7SRa_xQNQ These people are professionals at wearing the skin of prey, but really, they are the predators, they are the wolves in sheeps clothing.

I hope the targets of such attacks have reported the incidents to the authorities, and that at least some of the perpetrators will be punished.

The cruelty and immorality of such attacks aside, I don’t even understand (from a purely utilitarian perspective) why any GG supporter would do this. Such attacks only discredit GG. I have said this many times in GG chats and forums, hoping that it might convince some idiot troll to not do it, because apparently morality doesn’t affect their decisions.

Assuming for the sake of argument that online abuse is attributed to Gamergate supporters (and surely, some amount greater than 0% is from GG supporters), I don’t have any problem condemning it. There are real people on the receiving end of this. I became friends with an anti-GG games journalist (who is not implicated on deepfreeze, for the record) during the controversy, and when he found out I was pro-GG his first reaction was to tell me that his biggest concern was the safety of his family because he could get doxxed or SWATed. That’s completely understandable. At this point I’d already been to his home, and I reassured him that I would never disclose his address or any other private info, and if I ever knew anyone who was doing something illegal in the movement, I would inform the police. I meant it. And I think you will find that this is a majority opinion within Gamergate.

It pisses me off that I even have to preemptively disclaim that, as a Gamergate supporter, I wouldn’t betray confidences and put a person at risk to “aid” my cause. Our mission is to root out corruption in games media and rebuild an ethical, fair, and free press. Abuse does not aid this goal. It doesn’t matter where the abuse is coming from, its wrong. We are better than Leigh Alexander, Ben Kuchera, and others who think that justice means helping your friends and harming your enemies.

But here is the conundrum we find ourselves in. Whenever we try to have a conversation about ethics, the response is never on-topic, but to change the subject to harassment. The opposition’s narrative is that even though we are always talking about ethics, we don’t really care about it. We’re allegedly just horrible people that want to to horrible things to vulnerable people. Any facts that contradict this narrative are discarded. Gamergate identifies Antia Sarkeesian’s worst harrasser? Down the memory hole. Gamergate harassment patrol to root out abuse on Twitter? Forget it. Point out the instances where our side was the victim, which actually appears to outnumber the instances of abuse targeting anti-Gamergate? The media certainly can’t admit that!

The media has made up their minds about which narrative will be covered. Which raises the issue of whether it’s worth it for Gamergate to try to rehabilitate its image in the press. Hence, as I understand it, why the harassment patrol faded away. Which isn’t to say Gamergate has stopped reporting harassment (just within the last month or two Sarkeesian was hit with some nasty tweets that she publicized, which Gamergate had reported to Twitter before she publicized them), it’s just not making the same effort to do so publicly that it used to. Because why bother?

But that’s us. I have to wonder why the SPJ wants to discuss online abuse as well. It makes sense that SPJ wants to talk about ethical standards of journalists. But what role does SPJ have in rooting out bad behavior by random assholes on the internet? Look, if you want to raise examples of people in Gamergate who are acting as journalists (even if they self-identify as “bloggers”) and apply ethical standards to their conduct, fire away. I have no problem with that sword cutting both ways, because it means more reliable sources for me as a reader. But the vast, overwhelming majority of abuse out there is coming from anonymous trolls who give zero fucks about what the SPJ thinks of them, and who I would think the SPJ gives zero fucks about because they are not journalists, they’re just jerks with an internet connection and free time on their hands. I would suggest that the conference would be best served if you maintain focus on ethics in games journalism.

Let me makes this clear:
The harassment from both sides is completely inconsequential to the discussion of journalistic ethics.

Actions being taken now by anons on the internet do not undo the unethical conduct of journalists from the past. They neither validate, nor invalidate the.

If you want to include Nyberg into this, feel free to do so, but she will not have anything to add to the discussion about journalism, except for derailment into a pointless debate about harassment on the internet.
I say pointless, because nothing ever gets accomplished in that debate. Nobody can do anything against online harassment, except for the harassers themselves, who are never present when the discussion is had. Instead the harassment gets instrumentalised to help a speaker to advocate for, or against a position.

You’d do well to just get a couple of the journalists in question into the boat.
Totilio and Grayson have been named a few times, and I think they would be good choices. Alexander too.

I have two points I want to make. The first goes to the committee, the second, to ED and shit-slinging. But before I do that, I want to make a general point:

Not everyone who posts on the Internet is a journalist nor should be held to journalistic standards just as not everyone who uses a bandage is a doctor and should be held to AMA standards of practice. The problem we have is people who claim they are journalists (doctors) ignoring the standards of practice for their chosen profession. If you want to hold everyone who makes a comment on a blog, who posts on a forum or uses twitter to journalistic standards, well, I think that’s firstly unrealistic and secondly missing the point of having a professional organization with such standards.

As far as my two points go…

The first point is that the so-called committee was supposed to be for the purpose of choosing speakers. Now you are using them to speak for people who support the hashtag. You are doing so by asking them about certain behaviors on both sides. I call foul.

That wasn’t the point of the “committee” and I will not support any such committee or event that does so. So, please stop. You’re changing the “rules of engagement” and propping them up as some kind of leaders. That’s dirty pool. For one thing, the group en masse didn’t pick them – you selected them. And you said you selected them to choose speakers, not be speakers. Yet now you are using them as voices of GamerGate.

Inclusion in ED is orthogonal to GamerGate except in the fact people have become “internet famous” because of GamerGate

If you’re going to apply journalistic standards to a shit-flinging site like ED, are you going to take on applying the same to another user-edited site that claims to be respectable like Wikipedia? You will find corruption going on in Wikipedia edits that was so bad it left like 5 anti-GamerGate Wikipedia editors banned / restricted by Wikipedia even though ArbCom was desperately trying to find reasons not to. You may also find a touch of obsessive issues in a particular editor named Ryulong who, after getting kicked out of Wikipedia by ArbCom for, among other things, taking money to do edits on GG, went to RationalWiki where he edits the GamerGate article for 16 hours a day. That’s not an exaggeration, either. The guy has a serious obsessive problem with keeping the narrative to his liking.

As far as ethics goes, I can only speak for myself, but I’m kind of sick of being preached to like I’m a naughty child when the other side runs rampant in its dirty bullshit. For one thing, I’ve done no such things. For another, if you are going to preach, maybe you should do it to the editors of ED instead of GamerGate as a movement. Then you can preach to Nyberg.

In your wanderings, maybe you will come across the fact that Nyberg accused 8chan of being a pedophile outlet and spun up people into reporting it for hosting kiddie porn (a lie). That ended up getting the name registrar to suspend its domain registration taking the site down for two days.

I hope you appreciate the irony of someone who has admitted being a pedophile in multiple place on the internet over several years accusing 8chan of being a swarm of pedophiles – for the sole purpose of getting the site shutdown.

Which goes to a previous comment I made. The anti-GamerGate mob slings shit, and when someone slings back, they act like innocent victims. They’re not. There is enough shitty behavior on both sides, but they play the victim card and for some reason the media, apparently including you now, eat it up.

But back to the topic of Airplay – I thought this was going to be a debate about the accusations of lack of ethics in gaming journalism. You’re now moving the goalposts demanding people behave in a certain way.

If you instead want to hold court about shit slinging and the character of people involved, we can do that, too, but it will in fact be worse for the people defending the behavior of these journalists. Among them will be found people who are seriously mentally ill, people known to have been involved in scams, ex-Nazis (literally), meth users, etc.

When is the post coming out about how people against GamerGate should stop their behavior? How they shouldn’t DDOS sites, dox people (some of whom got fired), make bomb threats etc.?

Right, that’s what I thought. Maybe we should stick to the original point of this. A debate about *journalists* and their ethics, not the ethics of people shitposting on ED or twitter.

Or are you about to make the mistake of getting involved in the shaping of the story instead of reporting on it? To be honest, I’m starting to question your motives in this, and I don’t think I’m alone in that regard.

Mike, your problem isn’t that you’re an asshole (you may be, I leave that discussion for you and your spouse to resolve). Your problem is that you, like a lot of smart professionals, are arrogant enough to believe that you’re the first person to take an objective look at this issue and see some kernel of truth. You aren’t.

There’s no stone unturned here. Debates have been had, endlessly. Your entire premise — that there is a serious discussion left to be had within the confines of the #gamergate issue about journalistic ethics — is fundamentally flawed.

Why? Because the majority, if not the overwhelming majority, of GGers have not even put the time or effort in to honestly come up with a workable definition of what “ethics” means. Consider this: most of them actually wholeheartedly agree with the statement that “being a ‘social justice warrior’ is unethical.” Despite the oft-repeated claims of them being “anti-censorship” and “pro-artistic freedom,” their core unifying aim is to “beat” feminist and leftist cultural critics out of gaming and gaming discussions, because they feel that the very act of voicing such critiques is an assault on their culture, and a libel on them personally.

So while I agree they very genuinely believe themselves to be a movement about professional ethics, the problem is they simply have a completely unworkable and in fact deeply suspect definition of what professional ethics are.

Consider that a top candidate for their contingent is Bokhari’s colleague and friend Milo Yiannopoulos. If any significant number of GGers felt that simple bias in journalism was “unethical,” then Yiannopoulos — a scathing, unabashedly partisan cultural critic of the left – would be a great poster child for unethical journalism. If they felt dishonesty or playing loose with the facts was unethical, then again, Yiannopoulos, who’s blamed a bomb threat on “feminists” and jumped the gun badly on blaming a recent kerfuffle with Joss Whedon on feminism as well, would have to be thrown in the unethical pile. If they really believed “harassment” and personal attacks were unethical, they’d have to concede that Yiannopoulos’s vituperative articles on Shanley Kane and tweets calling Nyberg a “vile tranny” were unethical. Hell, Yiannopoulos has unequivocally stated his own belief that GG is not primarily about ethics at all.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Yiannopoulos is a jerk, but I am not ready to accuse him of being in violation of the ethical code governing his profession. He’s entitled to speech. Speech works like that.

But really, don’t let arrogance blind you to this glaring red flag. Yiannopoulos would not seriously be put forth as a standard bearer by people who genuinely favor unbiased, non-smearing, “ethical” journalism. Something’s fundamentally wrong with this picture.

That said, I do not agree with some opponents of GG that GG is primarily a “hate mob.” Indeed, that response is unproductive. I don’t think most of GG are even necessarily acting in bad faith. To the contrary, I think they are genuine in their belief that there is a problem with games press. But the *real* problem they have is that they don’t like the viewpoints of certain segments of that press, and they dress that up as an ethics charge out of intentional or unintentional ignorance.

Don’t get me wrong. GG has uncovered some small number of ethical improprieties. But they’ve also allowed even bigger ones to pass under their nose without comment. For example, GG was off hunting SJWs while the Shadow of Mordor developer was paying YouTubers for positive coverage of their game — a story the “unethical” and “boycotted” indie sites like Kotaku were owning hard. Why some violations and not others, because only some dovetail properly with chasing away — silencing — certain cultural critiques and critics from games.

For GG, your event is just another opportunity to score a victory in an ideological battle. They don’t *really* want honest discussion, they want to win and gain legitimacy for their barely hidden viewpoint that some cabal of feminists and radicals are trying to destroy games and “slander” gamers.

“Convince my fellow journalists and your wounded opponents that they have nothing to fear by attending AirPlay.”

How can we guarantee there won’t be another bomb threat called by some zealot? Any threat to journos or aGGros is just as much a threat to us, whether physically, such as a bomb threat, or by doxing, contacting our employers. Most of us are anonymous for a reason.

“Freedom is not defined by safety. Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference. Government cannot create a world without risks, nor would we really wish to live in such a fictional place. Only a totalitarian society would even claim absolute safety as a worthy ideal, because it would require total state control over its citizens’ lives. Liberty has meaning only if we still believe in it when terrible things happen and a false government security blanket beckons.” ― Ron Paul

The reason Totilli, Alexander or anybody else won’t come, is because if they don’t just sit there and label Gamergate a hate group, they will be filleted online by those who want nobody to ever talk about anything that puts a different light on the narrative they have spent months, and hundreds, thousands maybe of articles and blogs, constructing.

That is why the SPJ guy is getting played here, by framing it as harrasment? Nobody here can stop that, apart from condemning it and moving on.

But to have someone like Sarah Nyborg as the poster child, this is pointless, may as well pack it all up and save the hassle.

Here’s the thing I have to point out time and time again: When opponents of GamerGate scream loudly about harassment, they escalate things even further. Whether that’s just because they don’t see the consequences of their actions (which I doubt, considering we’re now nine bleeding months into this) or because they WANT to escalate, I do not know.

What I do know, though, is that they’re making claims. And making a claim puts the burden of proof on them. In the same way that reporting Nyberg’s crimes – if there were any – to the authorities, the parties claiming they’re being harassed need to ACTUALLY take this to the authorities and let them handle it, rather than using Internet mobs to “take out harassers” without a single shred of proof to back up the claim.

The “culture of fear” that opponents of GG often mention in respect to this mess? It’s the fear I feel every time I engage someone to point out that simple burden of proof. It’s the fear I feel every time I say something controversial.

It’s the fear I feel that my life could be ruined at a moment’s notice through lies and slander from people who have made a career out of marginalizing others.

People have made many excellent points here, but I believe in learning through experience.

Here’s my suggestion: Make a Reddit account, go to GamerGhazi and post this exact post after switching the names of Nyberg and AMIB to someone who’s pro-GamerGate.

Watch what happens and you’ll understand why we have no interest or patience in debating nobodies: They have no relevance to ethics in gaming journalism while the journalists we’re criticizing have full relevance to it.

(In case it’s unclear: Misandry-Manatee ‏( @Firebomb173 ) posts a twitter message with a screenshot of 8chan with a ridiculous combative tone that gamergate supporters see through quickly. The screenshot proves that the post was made by this person self, because otherwise the posts don’t say “you”)

This false flag attack by @firebomb173 is then kept in the minds of people by
‏@ohferfckssake

This wasn’t the first and won’t be the last false flag. Suffice to say, we’re tired of people like man in black who won’t rectify their false facts and stories.

But by all means invite them to discussion, I have no doubt that this means they will either have to step up their game and approach things factually and with good sources or keep up their dishonest ways and expose their own fallacies.

For those GGers irritated that Nyberg has been pushed to prominence in this discussion, I note that respected leaders in your revolt/movement, particularly Milo and Ralph, were the ones who put her in the forefront by going after her as a pedophile this week.

Shrbutts is a Twitter nobody, who got caught with illegal donation runs regarding a piracy-site that she has been running for years, and now her talks about pedophilia have been leaked. Shrbutts has gained specific ire from users of 8chan (and its /gamergate/ board) because she was part of the group created by Dan Olson that tried to fabricate a lie that 8chan houses child porn, despite 8chan rules clearly stating otherwise and a history of 8chan admins immediatly removing any illegal content from the board.

Shrbutts is not above harassing and fabricating harassing lies on other people, hence why nobody on pro-GG side will garner any sympathy towards her now that her disgusting pedophile-IRC chat logs have been leaked.

All of this serves as a distraction for the whole SPJ-event, which is why antiGG along with Shrbutts is pushing it. If they want to confront Gamergate on this mostly fabricated “Harassment”-issue, then they’re welcome to come to the panel and represent the other side of the debate.

Michael, if you’re after some sortof PR stunt from GG, it’s not going to happen, why? Because we’ve been there, done that,and all that came from it were more accusations. Fighting for better journalism -> sexists and rasists.
Trying to give women and minotities a voice trough NotYourShield -> Weaponising women and minorities.
Fight narrative of GG trying to get women out of the industry by giving over 25000 (probly twice that, but that’s trough the referal link) to a feminist project trying to help women get into the games industry -> Even more misogynistic as ZQ didn’t like their spokesperson.
Get blamed for harassment and bullying, responding by raising over almost 17000$ to anti-bullying, and over 5500 for suicide prevention -> weaponising charity.
Saying we’re sorry that peopel face harassment -> is taken as admition of guilt and used against us.
Start anti-harassment patroll -> the members gets blamed for harassment, and get harassed for trying to help.

“insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”

We’ve come to the point where we’ve realised that nothing will “redeem” us in the eyes of these people, why? Because they hate us. You don’t do this for 9 months unless you either hate something or love something, and you don’t have people calling for deathcamps without hatred being a motivating factor. So at this point, nothing we can do can change their idea about us being monsters. If it was going to happen, it would have happened months ago, not over this comment section. And what they fear more than the monsters they’ve painted us as is that they were wrong. That we’re not these terrible people who all out to get them. And that’s a fear they themselves have to come over, and nothing we can really do anything about.

GG have had several meetups and attended several cons, and other than the bomb treath, all went just fine. No women run out of gaming, no harassment, no lynch mobs. Just a bunch of passionate people meeting up and having fun. Which is exactly what would happen at SPJ, and the journos know it, and I think you know it Michael.

Was this the response you wanted? Probably not, but it’s important to understand the reasoning from our side and why PR is seen as a lost cause when you’re up against the press who hold the megaphone. And I think you know that all who heard about the journos who heards about the debate made up their mind at that second, and unfortunatly there is nothing I can say that will change their mind.

Here is a simple observation on AMiB and SRH Butts. Like many “Gators” throughout this ordeal, I tried to engage with both in good faith. Like many ‘Gators, I had my attempts re-posted out of context and mocked.

Regarding Mrs. Nyberg, I’ll make another point. Sexual abuse of children isn’t a joke. Like so many others, I know a few adults who were abused as children. The lingering effects are pretty horrific.

That someone would claim to have some sort of moral high-ground while engaged in such behaviors is utterly disgraceful.

Also, a final point, regarding ED, or Encyclopedia Dramatica. In the simplest terms, they rip everyone apart; pro-GG, anti-GG, neutral – if ED writes an article, it won’t be flattering.

Respectfully, Sarah Nyberg and “A Man in Black” are extraneous actors who sit out on the periphery of Gamgergate. They are not games journalists. They are irrelevant to the story and conversation. As interlocutors, their only role in the debate is to get Gamergate to shit down and shut up, which is a pointless, Sisyphean effort. Both the gaming and mainstream press have labelled Gamergate a “hate mob” for nine months now, and it clearly hasn’t made Gamergate go away.

“Funny, that’s what people told me about your side a week ago. I always believe in trying to talk.

Here’s a true test of GamerGate’s commitment: Tell A Man in Black you understand.”

As you’ve certainly realized by now, based upon his response to you, AMIB isn’t interested in talking, or even “trying” to talk. What, exactly, should Gamergate tell AMIB that they understand? To quote him, “I cannot make this any clearer …GG is an abusive hate mob with no legitimacy.” Clearly, there is no conversation to be had here. According to you, you and AMIB “debated what percentage of GamerGate is hateful.” And, “he maintains it’s 100 percent…” This is of course wild hyperbole and unfalsifiable conjecture—opinion dressed up as fact. The number of participants in Gamergate is unquantifiable and recondite, a fact any sane observer would acknowledge.

I admire your effort here, but talking to Nyberg or AMIB is frankly a waste of everyone’s time. Your time would be better spent speaking to an actual games journalist. Or rather, if you must talk to anti-Gamergate, you should try to determine exactly what they want. Presumably, they want Gamergate to end, but their peevish and repetitive chant of “hate mob, hate mob, hate mob” won’t accomplish that. Ask them what their plan to end Gamergate consists of. Hint: they don’t have one. To quote David Auerbach:

“The Gamergate ‘debate,’ such as it is, currently boils down to people screaming ‘It’s actually about ethics in gaming journalism!’ and ‘It’s actually about misogyny in the gaming world!’ at each other on Twitter. People are forced to take sides or else get caught in the crossfire.”

…

“I recently spoke to a number of vocally anti-Gamergate people and asked them how they planned to end Gamergate. Nobody knew. The standard reply was, ‘Gamergate should stop harassing people,’ which is not an answer. The best I got was, ‘Gamergaters will get tired of it eventually,’ but that’s not good enough. These people are watching a house on fire and refusing to dial 911 because they’re trying to shame the arsonist into making the call.”

As you can see, David Auerbach has already done what you’re doing here and came to the conclusion that anti-Gamergate doesn’t have a plan for ending Gamergate. As far as I can determine, Auerbach is the only contra-Gamergate figure to lay out a coherent plan for ending Gamergate that doesn’t consist of telling Gamergate to go away and shut up. Ignore Nyberg and AMIB. Read and/or talk to Auerbach.

I’ve been following Gamergate for a while now. If you want to talk, I’m on Twitter: @whyu_fail

There are two sides to every story, and many of the primary things those against GG get wrong are conflating us with groups like GNAA, Baph, and Bill Waggoner Crew.

The most powerful metric you can use to get your answers is not claims made, by either side. It’s evidence. Evidence can be gathered by experiment, for example the one suggesting you post this to ghazi gives a good idea. Another point for evidence is, examine the articles written claiming we are harassers. See what evidence they have to support their claims. One of the only reasons I’ve stuck it out this long with Gamergate is that I never see evidence demonstrating the accuracy of their narrative.

I am tired of trying to promote the fact that I’m not a harassing misogynerd, but your concerns aren’t wrong. Requesting a sound-off from us that we don’t support harassment is something asked of us far too often. The answer is yes, harassment and threats are not acceptable behavior and we do not support them.

Slightly tangential but I’d like you to know GG try to archive damn near everything, said by anyone on any side, so we won’t be shy with linking sources. So please do ask for evidence. Reddit pages, chan threads, news articles, forum posts, tweets (including deleted ones), emails, leaks from mod mail and IRC etc etc. You do not have to take our word for any claim we make, you can see the sources or ask for them and decide for yourself.

In the interest of equal treatment, ask for sources for claims made against gamergate too, including the journalists who reported on this; do not assume due diligence was done. See with your own eyes. Some of our claims may be far fetched to some and tin-foil to others but we do not make those claims with no basis. More importantly, we spread sources so anyone can INDEPENDENTLY VERIFY those claims.

Not at all surprising stance for a group who finds their comments selectively deleted on many forums and comment sections across the internet, misrepresented by media, blatantly lied about, cherry picked comments and edited to hell interviews.

We like to cling to facts and we like to verify our facts, including facts spread by our own.

You are now following in the footsteps that Mark Kern has walked who previously tried to bridge the gap that existed in the games industry. Please ask him of his experiences. His twitter handle is @Grummz. He can also share with you his experiences of his conversations with AMIB.

Another criticism I have of GG is that we tend to hand-wave some criticisms as done by third party trolls too much. It is most likely true that this is done by third-party, however I have seen the claim thrown around too much without actually checking.

Also, A_man_in_black has also openly admitted that he got into this just to “bloody his knuckles on some nerds”, or really just to bully people. For me, that sealed my impression of him as an unpleasant person…. https://archive.is/AolNg

If you remember recent history, Joss Whedon quit twitter after he received some heavy-duty fallout about being a sexist of the avengers movie. Well, like always, here comes Sarah Nyberg to stir the shit.

You’ll notice no response for 6 days after I laid out the evidence, until I tweeted you into the thread today. I went ahead and archived the tweets so history could not be rewritten. I just thought you might want to know a little more about who you’re dealing with. You cannot take a liar at face value.

Nobody deserves to be harassed, but nobody deserves to be lied to either.

I find it strange that you would believe Nyberg or AMIB and just take their word for it, without asking them for any evidence or proof.

1) Encyclopedia Dramatica has existed long before GamerGate started, and it will continue to do so long after GamerGate has gone. They do not care about GamerGate either way.

2) Ralph Retort has been continuously criticised for being pure clickbait and inflammatory for no reason and is not really supported by the GG hubs as something good.

3) Nyberg and other anti-GG celebrities on Twitter continuously harass (Harassing here means if we were to apply their own definition of that to themselves) GG supporters. This is all recorded on the various websites that are keeping track of anti-GG harassment (Harassing here means if we were to apply their own definition of that to themselves) of GG supporters. If someone is harassing (Harassing here means if we were to apply her own definition of that to herself) others on Twitter and saying that doxing is a good thing sometimes to out bad people (Nyberg really said this on her twitter), why would you blame all of GG when something bad happens? Just because she said it was GG?

4) Correct me if I’m wrong, but if I recall correctly, the chat logs and pictures that were supposedly hacked from Nyberg were available on a public forum and site. She put them up there on the public site and livejournals she frequented and commented on and she made it clear that that was her. If someone found those and used her own words to prove she considers herself a pedophile, is that considered hacking? Should GG be blamed for that?

Someone linked you to an article that Nyberg wrote, where she offered 0 evidence of her claims, and you, as a journalist, took her word for it, without any evidence offered or requested. When people tell you she is a lying troll who manufactures anti-GG talking points by posting out of context and poorly cropped screencaps, you then compare this to how people have acted with GG, namely that people have heard the same about GG being full of trolls and liars and that you give both sides a fair shake. The difference is that whenever GG has agreed on something that needs to be presented to the outside world, it has always backed up its claims with evidence: archives, logs, tweets, articles etc. Why would you just listen and believe someone when they say that GG has harassed them in all the ways Nyberg says she was, without asking them for proof that it was coordinated on the main GG hubs or even approved by them?

Finally, you say that: “…10,000 reasonable people whispering can drown out 100 trolls who are screaming. If another Sarah Nyberg-like atrocity happens between now and AirPlay, let 10,000 posts like the one on Reddit decry her doxing.” A couple of things. First, KiA has always decried stuff like that. And yet, when it happens, even though KiA decries and denounces it, anti-GG still labels them as being supportive of it somehow. I say this because I see what you are trying to do with this post. You are trying to get GG hubs to actively denounce anything bad that happens that is then blamed on GG by anti-GG. You maybe believe that this will lead anti-GG to come to table as they may genuinely fear for their safety and well-being. There is literally no way this will happen. Not because KiA does not denounce it, but because anti-GG refuses to acknowledge it.

The example you give of the Harassment Patrol is a fine one. GG supporters rallied together to stop the harassment that anti-GG said was rife. For months GG supporters reported any tweet or Twitter account that anti-GG reported to the Harassment Patrol. The result of all of this? Articles by anti-GG media continued to blamed GG for harassment. Nyberg and AMIB continued to label GG as a movement purely focused on harassment. None of them acknowledged any good that was done by GG supporters. Not even when members of the Harassment Patrol finally tracked down one of Anita Sarkeesian’s most prolific harassers on Twitter: a Brazilian journalist. They were still blamed for it, with no mention of any of the good they have done.

If you believe GG hubs denouncing harassment (Something they have been doing all along) is suddenly going to get anti-GG to come to the table for discussion of ethical breaches, impropriety and appearance of impropriety in video games journalism, you are sorely mistaken. Ofcourse, you are free to try. We’ve been there. We have tried to talk to them. We have tried to do what they said for 9 months just so we could have a dialogue. Their actions tell me they do not want one.

Secondly, why is it considered an atrocity for someone’s public pictures and posts, ones they themselves put out there for the world to see, are seen and read by people interested in them?

Thirdly, you do know that this part of your post is an invite to the various trolling groups on the internet to come and live out their fantasies, right? They get to troll and even harass people and all anti-GG has to do is write articles saying it was GG, without any proof, and you will expect us to apologize for something we did not do. With the added bonus of the trolls actually being able to take away the best chance for a dialogue we have had for 9 months.

Nothing in this post has anything to do with GamerGate. Just like Dave Rickey said you are just feeding the trolls by writing this. A_Man_In_Black and srhbutts are trolls. You should take everything those people say with a mountain of salt.

You’d be wise to listen to Dave more on the subject of trolls in future. That guy has been involved with online gaming communities since the late 90s with his work on MMOs. He is exactly the person you should be listening to because he knows what’s up when it comes to trolling better than anyone on your committee.

I’m with Frank here. The “or else” quality of these writings doesn’t inspire any confidence as to the good faith of this project. Rather, it says, over and over again: “Sure, this is a cloudy issue and I’ll admit that to me it looks like both sides have done wrong…but if anyone misbehaves, it’s definitely GamerGate’s fault and you’ll have proven your ill intentions!”

You’re looking for a way to back out of this, or a reason to lean toward one side over another. Give that stuff up, and maybe people will stop giving you so much side-eye.

I posted here anonymously on your first foray into the #GamerGate controversy and the consumer revolt. I specifically addressed the dealings of the ayy team during #SPJEthicsWeek and how they constitute third party trolls.

Nyberg and AMIB are essentially the equivalent of third party trolls. They aren’t involved in the industry professionally (though Nyberg does host pirated software for profit), and their primary objective is to harass, shame, libel, and ostracize consumers outside of their clique.

The people you should be talking to are Nathan Grayson, Leigh Alexander, Patricia Hernandez, Ben Kuchera, Jason Schrier, Brandon Boyer, Chris Plante, Dale North, Ian Miles Cheong, Stephen Totilo, and members of the GamesJournoPros in general.

There are a bunch of people that are profiting off of the harassment narrative. Harassment is never justified, but the people listed above have deflected criticism of their known and documented journalistic impropriety (visit deepfreeze.it for details) through the harassment narrative and actually encouraging third party trolls to stir up the pot and harass innocent people. Stephen Totilo, EIC of Kotaku, had the chance to admit the failings of one of his journalists, apologize to his readers, and take public, transparent actions to rebuild trust, and this whole thing would have been over in a week. Instead, the group mentioned above doubled down on the harassment narrative, publicized threats and harassment (which law enforcement at every level advises against) and exposed vulnerable people to organized groups of trolls such as the ayy team and the GNAA.

For months members of the revolt made many attempts to condemn harassment and threats done to anyone by anyone. As you mentioned, we policed our own (and still do to, albeit not under the name of the GGHP), we worked with law enforcement and site owners. The people listed above have not apologized or made any efforts to minimize harm. They have not condemned threats of violence. They have actively engaged in the harassment of others and purposefully agitated trolls to distract and deflect people away from their professional failings.

But if it’s really going to make a difference to you, I don’t have a problem condemning threats again. This isn’t to be construed as an admission of guilt as AMIB or others would have you believe. Talking to Mark Kern about his interactions with AMIB and Nyberg should give you an idea about the situation. They attacked Kern for trying to do something similar to what you’re doing now relentlessly, simply because he bothered to speak to us. They aren’t rational or moral actors. They feed off of the attention they receive, positive or negative, and then use that to further fuel and justify their relevance to the revolt. They’ve capped tweets coming from exasperated individuals telling them to “fuck off” after they hounded innocent third parties for hours as evidence of ‘harassment’, and then use that as justification for their friends to mass-report and pester their new ‘harasser’.

I think others have laid out details of their behavior well enough. I’d like to emphasize that they are essentially third-party trolls. They may constitute the bulk of the ‘anti-GG’ camp, but they are decidedly trolls. Talk to the journalists implicated in the scandal. Talk to the developers harmed by the journalists implicated in the scandal. If you must talk to the industry members ‘harmed by gamergate’, then you must also talk to industry members harmed by the trolls composing ‘anti-gg’ such as @gmshivers, @polarroller, TFYC and Autobotnika, and everyone else. Please don’t feed the trolls.

We’ve been here for nine months because the harassment narrative is strong enough to prevent further probing. When you step into the middle of an internet slapfight, you don’t see all the things which led up to it. You don’t see how someone like Sarah “Context-Free” Butts has libeled everyone by pulling quotes out of context to prove her point, going as far as using hypothetical examples people use as statements of their beliefs. It’s hard to understand why the internet would even care about such a person if you don’t see how such a person has been throwing vitriol and lies at innocent people. Mob justice is short-sighted, but it’s not wholly irrational. There is a reason why the internet is pissed off at Sarah Butts.

That said, I’m willing to let all of that slide because it’s irrelevant to Gamergate. I would honestly prefer it if people never mentioned Sarah Butts again. For the sake of ethics, I am willing to fully condemn whatever harassment Butts has received and move on. It’s the journalists we care about and their unethical practices. They have tried to stonewall any and all open dialogue, going as far as creating a blockbot which blocks people by association. I have never tweeted anything at most of the big names in anti-Gamergate and yet, I find myself on a list of “the worst harassers” of Gamergate. It’s dishonest tactics like this which have broken down dialogue over the last nine months. This is our best bet at reopening dialogue.

I hope you take the time to listen to our claims. As with all of our operations, there will be trolls who will try everything in their power to make us look bad. Please have an open mind. I firmly believe the truth is on our side and I am willing to stake my reputation, and my future employability, on it.

Anti-GGers and GGers alike have been doxxed, people dropped out from both sides for fear of their safety, or that of their children. Yet despite 9 months of fear mongering nothing has happened. Third-party trolls have celebrated the fact that no matter what happens it gets blamed on Gamergate. You don’t even have to prove a person who make threats was even in Gamergate. Anyone can post in the hashtag!

Nothing has actually happened. No one was harmed. However the Media, the journalists involved painted a whole ton of people are violent terrorists out to crush women. Blockbots have gone up to slander anyone involved as some of the worst on the internet. They then dismiss any wrongdoing on Anti-GG’s behalf. Yet Gamergate is the one now publicly holding meetups. “yes we’ll be here, we’re not afraid.” Anti-GG folks run to get any meetup or event shut down in advance.

It’s happening for Airplay. What if a Pro-GGer was quoting the vile things Nyberg and insisting Airplay shouldn’t allow them in? Such a claim would be dismissed. The very things Anti-GG accuses GG do is something they enjoy doing on a regular basis. They dox without consequence because the journalists simply won’t cover it. We managed to convince someone from Kotaku to at least begrudgingly acknowledge the bomb scare in the GGinDC meetup. Anti-GG refuses to acknowledge any of the evidence backed claims, yet any time they point out one of their members got some harassment from some source over these past 9 months all of a sudden it’s a huge deal.

All because of how this is being reported. Airplay is needed so both sides will be seen fairly, not just at that event, but in the future moving forward.

“now-dormant self-policing force #Gamergate harassment patrol”
I have some problems with that line because
1. Its not dormant
2. Its not for self-policing, its for any kind of harassment, from #GamerGate, anti-GG, or third party trolls
3. Its implied its a group of people, its technically not, its anyone who feels the need to report harassment in Gamergate, i’ve reported things multiple times and i dont have a badge that says “#GamerGate harassment patrol”
Yesterday when Brianna Wu’s phone was leaked by /baphomet/ people asked for #Gamergate harassment patrol and i reported when her phone number was tweeted to her.
We report all kinds of harassment, #GamerGate harassment patrol was just an easier way to get attention to harassment

Allow me to answer this section.
“Don’t get me wrong. GG has uncovered some small number of ethical improprieties. But they’ve also allowed even bigger ones to pass under their nose without comment. For example, GG was off hunting SJWs while the Shadow of Mordor developer was paying YouTubers for positive coverage of their game — a story the “unethical” and “boycotted” indie sites like Kotaku were owning hard. Why some violations and not others, because only some dovetail properly with chasing away — silencing — certain cultural critiques and critics from games.”

We actually did notice this and made threads regarding this. We were preparing to take action.

Why wasn’t any action taken? Because Youtubers whom it affected INSTANTLY reported it, and the company changed the policy almost as quickly. There was nothing for GG to do at that point, so we let it be.

Shrbutts is saying two different things when she said she was doxxed. An actual one and the current “one” outing her as a pedophile. I feel bad about the former and think there is no excuse for it, but the only connection between GG and that is a common website where it’s only rule is “nothing illegal”, outside of the rules set by each board’s mods. I’m not going to apologize for the second at all.

It was an IRC log and forum posts freely and openly available. It’s no different then retweeting something dumb someone on twitter. There was no “hacking”. There was no illegal gathering of information. It wasn’t done by GG, but is openly and proudly spread around by it.

It’s a public safety measure done for aGG’s own benefit warning them about her. There is a difference between revealing a personal picture for mockery online, a home phone number or their address, and something extremely concerning and dangerous, like threatening to kill someone or revealing themselves to be pedophile or having attempted cyber sex with a minor.

ED is a shock humor and internet drama chronicling website. Not only does GamerGate NOT have any control over it in any form, it’s not like the website actually likes us or has spared us a great deal of ridicule. It has taken a semi pro GG stance because many more of anti GG were already notorious on the site.

GGHP was a failure because bad actors massively abused the system and there was little GG could actually do. 99% of all actual harassment came from single use accounts or troll accounts that exists to hurt/mock people and were already waiting for a ban. Anyone can use or post in a hashtag, GG members can’t gatekeep or prevent people from using it. Just as importantly, people like AMIB and others conflated mutual flame wars (AGG telling a GG poster they have a tiny dick, to the GG poster calling them a virgin, one a fuckhead the other a shithead) or simple disagreement as harassment. What very little we could do was being stopped or diverted on a very purposeful level. Mutual name calling is bad but we are not people’s parents and it’s your full right to not to tweet someone you don’t want to, but don’t be surprised when you say something on twitter, which is like the void itself, and get a response you didn’t plan on it. It’s one of the actual features of the website and was planned on.

The reason GG supporters will not apologize for things they did not do is because they have been blamed for 9 months for things they did not do and have been expected to apologize by the media. All this while anti-GG has never had to apologize for things done by anti-GG. There is only so many times you can apologize to someone who has been flinging shit at your face who then demands you apologize for someone else calling them a doodoo-head.

Going back to the Harassment Patrol for example: a third party troll group decided they wanted to have some fun with GG by doxing journalists. The Harassment Patrol did their best to clamp down on that and reported anything they say to Twitter. The result? 1 tweet by a journalist saying that GG did something not so bad, followed by numerous articles, tweets and posts by anti-GG journalists and sites blaming GG for it. I do not blame GG supporters for being tired of all of this after what has happened these past 9 months.

And the reason for this reaction from GG supporters towards this post is that it comes off as yet another journalist who believes anti-GG claims just because they said so. No evidence required.

Multiple YouTubers quietly took the deal. And yet no mention of this, or the YouTubers, on deepfreeze.

An actual payola situation occurring during the height of GG but the headline GG complaint remains that Grayson wrote some non-existent glowing review of Quinn’s game before they started boning. Or that Leigh Alexander insulted gamers (and for the record, while I don’t think that was unethical, I do think it was unhelpful and counterproductive).

First, yeah, I pretty much agree with everything you said re: harassment. I haven’t really followed the whole pedophilia thing (I try to pay as little attention to people like Ralph and Nyberg as possible, to be honest), but that attempt to justify it’s exposure as “minimizing harm” is ridiculous.

You mentioned something on one of the streams the other day about how you were hoping that giving proper coverage to GamerGate would, as with other groups, minimize the likelihood of people lashing out in unproductive, nasty ways (you may have also said minimize the likelihood of radicalization, and if not, I am). The nasty stuff you are talking about here is *exactly why* I have been wanting the press to engage with us. I want to see the fuel drained from those tanks.

Unfortunately I’m not really convinced that reaching out to AMiB or Nyberg is really a valid option. Again, I don’t follow them particularly closely, but to me they just seem like the flipside of the bad actors on the GamerGate side of things.

Get me in a conversation with anyone on the anti-GG side whose emotions are primary frustration, anger, and confusion, and I would love to talk. When I look at AMiB and Nyberg all I see are people who enjoy hurting other people. It’s as odd a request as asking, say, Stephen Totilo to reach out to Ralph.

Have Butts prove to you herself that she was doxxed or whatever else she claims. I would be surprised if anything she says holds up to scrutiny. It’s not our responsibility to run around and humour her wild claims. The burden of proof is with her. I won’t take part in decrying harassment of each individual on our public platforms because that has nothing to do with what we’re about or what we’re doing. People like Butts and AMIB are utterly irrelevant to our movement and exist solely to distract from issues like this. If I give them air time I’m just furthering their goals.

Michael, if you really want to delve deeply into the soul and motivations of gamergate, you don’t have to start with Sarah Nyberg. As them if the creepy, stalking, Eron Gjoni post was justified, and get them talking about Zoe Quinn. Every time I tried to do that, starting in October, the conversation would start “This isn’t about Quinn, it’s about ethics, etc.”, but would end with rants about what an awful person Quinn is.

The name Gamergate originated with the posting of links to youtubes attacking Quinn. Gamergate is nothing but an extension and expansion of the harassment of Zoe Quinn.

That’s the reason you aren’t going to get any high profile feminist targets of gamergate on a panel.

It’s true that the intensity and relative longevity of gamergate means it can’t be ignored, and, following the standards of “seek truth and report it” and “act independently” you can’t report on gamergate without talking to gamergaters. It’s just that the dominant press narrative on gamergate isn’t that far off the mark.

AMiB and Nyberg are both agitators who have created a huge boogey-man out of a bunch of hashtag users- I call them agitators because I’ve seen them be deceptive about their retelling of events including incomplete screens to (apparently) willfully take something out of context.

As for GG harrassment patrol, I was a minor part of it- mostly signal boosting and reporting stuff- I think it was started by Margaret Gel, although I’m not really sure now- I kind of forget. Basically it stopped because people got burned out reporting aGG false flags and third-party trolls; it’s easy to get burned out about that kind of shit, especially when even when you are reporting abusive people for a long time you are still accused by aGG as all being misogynist terrorists or whatever.

as a case example there was some guy in brazil who was threatening aGG (brianna wu or anita iirc)- he turned out to be some programmer or something, anyway, basically the Brazilian police basically laughed at the GGers reporting harassment of someone instead of the person being harassed, and they would not do anything. It was stuff like that, I think, that slowly killed harassment patrol… Part of it was that us doing it was considered by aGG to be another thing like NotYourShield where their perception of it was only to protect us from the accusations.

Why bother bringing it back? I know it will make no difference in terms of the accusations against us, or in aGG’s failure to acknowledge the existence of 3rd party trolls, and I know it wont make much legal difference as in most places you have to be the one harassed to report harassment. Plus it takes a toll on you time and effort-wise, and Twitter’s reporting system isnt that great, honestly, from my experience with it.

People on both sides keep getting doxed. People on both sides keep condemning doxxing.
The only people I’ve seen publicly state that they support doxxing are Adam Sessler and Jim Sterling which when it was said they were just being blowhards but still.

The reason both sides condemn doxing yet both sides keep getting doxed is because 3rd party trolls want to see the group get the blamed and stir controversy for laughs.

There is likely a small percentage of such behaviour from legitimate supporters of each side as all groups have extremists, GamerGate has spent 9 months condemning and reporting any such people that might come along while all I’ve seen from the anti side is comments like “no bad tactics, only bad targets” and other lazy justifications as to why it’s okay when they do it.

I’ve observed both AMiB and Butts engage in harassing behaviour(by the standards they apply to us). I’ve watched them both lie and quotemine and do anything they can to not look at objective facts.
They are called trolls because no matter how much reason and evidence anyone has tried to show them they just keep pushing the predetermined narrative that they started with.

You have fallen into that narrative. Here you are writing a nice long article about the harassment the anti side gets ignoring that the gamergate side gets it arguably more severely. Milo’s mail, DC bomb threat, Honey Badgers Calgary Expo incident, etc…

With this article you have just pushed the same narrative pushed by the media using the same tactic of only looking at one side’s alleged bad behaviour and pushing the conversation to harassment away from the actual issues that we are here to discuss.

@wormsby – Because, again, the Shadow of Mordor debacle was addressed almost immediately after it was uncovered. Meanwhile, you seem to forget that the “headlines” you mention are on the one hand the suspicion that started this whole mess (and we could also hold hour-long debates about whether or not that actually was a breach – but at the end of the day, readers felt disclosure was necessary, it should be as simple as that), and on the other the incident that denounced thousands of gamers and literally declared their identity dead – and also the incident that actually led to the name “GamerGate”. I’m sorry if you find that hilarious and think you can just wave it away like that, but it’s not as simple. We are still talking about this because it still hasn’t been addressed by the people responsible.

That’s amazing isn’t Larry. How could people keep talking about Zoe Quinn, when Zoe Quinn was the agg talking point for months, used out front as some sort of evidence that gg was a hate group.

How can anyone defend themselves from that while not rebutting Zoe Quinns claims.

One thing IS for sure, the cowardice of Nathon Grayson not to step up and clear the air, rather than cower and try and save his reputation, is what really should anger those who defend Zoe.

Nathan is the one who did wrong. Eron is defended because he told the truth, and got a gag order for it. Hopefully his legal fund results in a over-turning of that un-constitutional order. He seems like a decent guy.

The reason why Nyberg has come under scrutiny is because this individual is an online agitator who puts an immense amount of effort into spreading disinfo about #gg and has actively campaigned against 8chan under the guise of anti-pedophilia. But as with so many others of #gg’s detractors, Nyberg turns out to be nothing more than just another hypocrite.

This is a self described pedophile who admits to having been in possession of the very same material he claimed was child pornography being spread by pedophiles on 8chan, who has never at any point come clean about his past as a pedophile and continually (perpetually one might say) takes statements out of context, misrepresents and outright lies about the motivations and methods of #gg supporters.

First of all, apologies if this has been posted multiple times; I’ve tried to submit this comment three times already but it hasn’t been showing up, and I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.

I’m what you might call a GG “lurker” or “moderate.” I’ve been watching this thing unfold for 9 months but until now I’ve never spoken or written about it online, joined any of the hashtag campaigns, none of that. This is the first time I’m speaking up.

I’m speaking up because I have to express just how much of a disappointment this post is to me. It’s exasperating to see yet another instance where I think that finally, finally after 9 months maybe someone will hear GG out on its journalistic concerns. Maybe someone will let GG supporters talk about journalism without first making them apologize for harassment that they by and large have nothing to do with. It’s like Charlie Brown and the football. “I swear, this time we’ll listen, but first you have to denounce harassment!” GG supporters will denounce harassment like they always have, but then–Yoink!–Lucy pulls the ball away anyway. Many of us are tired and we don’t want to be fooled again.

I don’t understand how harassment–which I denounce, by the way, it’s a horrible thing and nobody deserves it–should stall or prevent a conversation about journalistic malpractice. The allegations GG make either have merit, or they don’t, and the amount of harassment any side receives does nothing to change the amount of merit they do or don’t have. Many of us have been hoping for something resembling a CJR fact-finding mission, where an unbiased party can examine the allegations of journalistic misconduct, then draw and present conclusions. I was hoping that’s what this debate would be, but now I see that once again, GG supporters are having the fact-finding mission they’ve been waiting for held hostage by another case of “but first, let’s talk about harassment.”

I want to ask you, honestly, how you would react if the media, in response to the Baltimore riots, took the position of “we can have a conversation about police brutality, but only if we get 10,000 peaceful protestors to go down in the comments section and decry the riots”? This is basically your blog post in a nutshell. Does the SPJ endorse guilt by association as an ethical practice? Would an article like that get published by the Associated Press?

What about anti-GG? Plenty of commenters above me have cited cases of abuse by anti-GG to pro-GG. There’s even an entire blog documenting these cases. Why is it that the anti-GG position is considered valid by default, without having to first denounce or assume responsibility for the harassment on their side, but GG is forced to fight for this validation?

You have to understand, to those of us looking at things from the GG side of things, it feels like we’ve been living in Bizarro-world for the better part of a year now. The institutions and watchdogs who are supposed to protect consumers from journalistic abuse have either ignored us, or actively joined in the slander. It can feel like we’re stuck in a Body Snatchers movie and the journalistic establishment has been replaced by pod-people. Public trust in media is plummeting, while we’ve seen a rise in hoaxes and slander, but nobody seems concerned. The pod-people just stand there, motionless and emotionless, watching it all happen.

We’re not the “Other” that I’ve often read the media portray us as. We don’t live outside of society. We’re normal readers and consumers. We read the newspaper before work and watch the news after getting home. We are your audience, the “well-informed citizenry” SPJ claims to promote, and all we’re asking for is a fair shake.

After almost 9 months of anti-GG’s guilt by association bullshit I really don’t care what they or anyone else think. They associate with people that say they want to kill all gamers or kill all men but I’m the monster because there are ass holes and trolls using #gamergate in their tweets. We have boards like Baph doxing Wu and Nyberg because they hate GG and know they will blame GG and Wu and Nyberg happily go along with it and blame GG. I know I should care about what people on the other side are going through, and at the beginning I did, but I don’t. There’s just been too many lies for me to even believe their claims at this point.

After ~6 months that I’ve been in #GamerGate (yeah, late joiner), I still don’t understand how people are so narrow minded that they don’t understand few very basic and easy to understand things:

a) #GamerGate is a hashtag. A group of people identified under a hashtag that has no control, no moderation, no council, no tribunal, no restrictions, no logins, no identifications. Anyone can use it, anyone can abuse it.

b) No one is denying that there were bad things done on both sides, because of the a)

c) Because of a), we also cannot and will not take responsibility for all the trolls, doxers, serious harassers and so forth. We have and will continue to condemn anyone doing that, but to be honest, there are things that are beyond our control because of a). Block the trolls and call the police for the rest of cases.

d) No matter how it all started, at this moment, we are concerned over the outcome of it and that is, ethics in gaming journalism and that is what #GamerGate is currently and very seriously addressing with constant condemning of unethical journalists, deepfreeze.it website (which is still evolving) and now talks with the SPJ. If that is not a good enough proof that we are in fact about ethics, then I don’t know what is.

e) Questions regarding alleged lack of diversity in gaming and “gamers are all misogynists” is still on a table and as a gamer I will fight that (because it’s NOTHING like what I’m experiencing in 20+ years gaming history), but not on the SPJ AirPlay or in any other way related to SPJ, because this is not a concern for SPJ. Unless journalists are the ones who are calling half of their reader base misogynists without a single trace of evidence. In which case, it does become an ethical issue and does become a concern for SPJ. Which further proves #GamerGate has been and still is about ethics. You know, gamers are dead and all that…

Oh, and by all means, speak to them. I’m sure any interaction with them combined with observation of their actions will reveal them as the dishonest individuals that they are.

I might as well leave my thoughts about this article in general. I feel like it may be a slightly disingenuous attempt to prod GamerGate and see how we’ll react to various stimuli. I may be wrong, but I don’t think you really believe what you’re hearing from these people. Well, my reaction is to not fly off the handle and embroil myself in an argument with these people, and remain focused on the real issues. That’s what nine months of experience here tells me.

I’m not condemning you if this is the case. This may be a good way of revealing who is here to reform games journalism and who just has a chip on their shoulder.

The issue of harassment and doxing is easily the most muddled part of this debate. There are many who have been involved in GG for the better part of a year who still have difficulty grasping the circumstances. The culture behind trolling is unfathomable for most people, the journalists included. If we want to stop harassment, we need to break down the dynamics of this situation.

Trolling on the internet is much more sophisticated than individuals choosing to be abusive when the mood strikes them. It’s an entire internet culture that splinters into countless sub-cultures. It’s comprised of a myriad of groups, each with their own tactics, style and motivation.

Many of these groups take their trolling very seriously. They study the same social disruption tactics used by 3-letter government organizations. They compete with one another constantly, developing more and more sophisticated means of rusing the uninitiated. They are trained by being immersed in a unique and chaotic world where everyone is a anonymous trickster.

And these anonymous people are the ones the media is taking at their word.

Since this is a relative obscure and insular culture, most people aren’t ever really exposed to it. They don’t know that there are boards of trolling organizations that do nothing but look for targets to raid. This ignorance, combined with the media’s enthusiasm to latch onto salacious stories of internet harassment, has resulted in a conflation of these activities with a completely unassociated group of people.

GG has been very fertile ground for internet trolls. Every time they harass someone, their bounty is doubled by the media, who then happily frame every user of a hashtag with their crimes. Not only are they having their tracks covered for them, but every new article written about GG as a hate group is a bonus round of trolling. It’s a troll’s jackpot.

Let’s make this very clear. The vast majority of people, on either side of this thing, have condemned harassment, from the very beginning. That hasn’t changed.

The case of Sarah Nyberg is a bit more complex, since the allegations against her involve pedophilia. People almost always make exceptions for this uniquely heinous crime. Most default to “the ends justify the means” when it comes to catching pedophiles. That’s not an excuse for her harassment, but it is a fact of the matter. This is, perhaps, the worst example for that reason.

Frankly, if you want to tackle the issue of harassment, the demands of condemnation shouldn’t be made to a largely innocent group of people who happen to use a hashtag. A better place to start would be the news media. Every time an article intentionally or unintentionally rewards the efforts of trolls, the situation becomes even more toxic and more and more people are hurt as a result. There is a symbiotic relationship with trolls and the people reporting on them, at this point. If you really want to help the next Sarah Nyberg, let’s start by demanding nuance, fairness and common sense from the journalists who are supposed to be serving their audience. Let’s ask them to stop throwing gasoline on the fire.

It’s also extremely unfortunate because when pro-GG people get doxxed, such as the horrific doxxing of LizzyF620 where they posted floor plans and names of her children, it never gets any coverage by the press. There are number of women on twitter who talked about leaving Gamergate after Liz got doxxed. The sort of chilling effect it had nearly killed off broad support of this movement.

Again, the reason people like A Man in Black fear an open platform is because they are afraid of the facts. All we need is an open platform where we can present the facts. If we can get that, no fair-minded person would be able to disagree.

@larryfeltoni – You call it “creepy, stalking”, but what I saw was an abuse victim speaking about their experience. To this day I maintain that if it had been written by a woman, the reaction would’ve been vastly different. And yes, I maintain that Quinn is a horrible person, if what Eron said was true.

None of that relates to GamerGate, though. What relates to GamerGate about Quinn is solely the ethics breach Grayson was accused of. I’m not sure how you think we can talk about that at all without having to mention that Quinn was a developer and that the two had at the very least a close friendship before Grayson’s articles were posted. Sure a lot of people also went after her. Sure a lot of people were reacting to her – as an accused abuser – the same way many would’ve reacted to a male accused abuser. And sure there’s overlap between the two groups that were marginalized – one due to a gender-driven double-standard, the other because of journalists doubling down on deflecting criticism with wild claims. But that doesn’t mean the two sets of concerns and values aren’t distinct.

I don’t have a twitter account. I don’t have facebook. I have a single low subscriber youtube channel where I upload videos of myself playing games. I haven’t sent any threatening, violent, or otherwise ‘mean’ messages to anyone, indeed I have never written or recorded anything that could be described as ‘mean’ at all. I condemn threats, harassment, and the public exposition of private information.

For whatever it is worth, if it helps at all even in the slightest way, and I realize I am one small whisper among the voices, I apologize for all the harasement, hate, and vitriolic statements anyone involved with gamergate, or anti-gamergate has received. None of it is warranted.

I’ve browsed the very fast responses I got from my reply, and I still haven’t seen any gamergaters describe the Gjoni post for what it is: creepy and stalking. Do YOU folks write lurid 8,000+ word posts attacking your ex when you have a breakup, and recruit anonymous harassers to signal boost it? If you do, you need therapy, not a movement.

@larryfeltonj – There have been quite a few entire BOOKS written by abuse survivors on their experience. Stop minimalizing what happened and then making wild – unbacked – claims about harassment.

Although I fully agree, if you feel the need to write large essays about your experience in a relationship – abusive or not – you definitely need therapy. But that also applies to the countless tumblr users filling their blogs with nothing else.

Do people who change sexual identities expect people to not remember them up until that point? And any reference to their lives before that are ‘deadnaming’? Sarah was Nicholas, so what, she has no problem confiding her proclivities online, knowing her birth name is the least fucked up information.

Good job, ignore the responses and go to your own reality. Eron wasn’t creepy, he was foolish to think he would get a fair shake. He wan’t violent about it, he wanted to warn others.

He DID, ironically, get support from Tumblr feminists and abuse survivors, until it became a political liabillity and Zoe was the shield of every games journalist, and cause celebre for Feminits in the tech industry,

I don’t really know many people who have had what happened to him happen, so why would you compare that to an ordinary, non-emotionally abusive relationship?

I appreciate what you had to say and in large part, I agree, however there are some things to take into consideration. Third party trolls have played a much larger role in this controversy than anyone cares to admit and many gamergate supporters have grown tired of defending ourselves against accusations we know to be false. GamerGate supporters have taken great efforts in disproving the notion that we are pro-harassment; we held an anti-bullying fund raiser that raised over $15k, we helped fund raise for suicide prevention and we even tracked down and exposed the Brazilian clickbait “journalist” who was behind the threats against Anita Sarkeesian. The issue is, none of it was good enough, it wasn’t enough for GG to denounce harassment, then it wasn’t enough to put our money where are mouth was and raise nearly $20k for anti-bullying because our critics labeled them PR stunts and dismissed our efforts outright.

GG has always been interested in a resolution but months of misrepresentation in the main stream media, on Wikipedia and on social networking has made it very difficult to have conversations with people like AMiB. Especially since GG is dismissed out of hand as a hate group, we have no way to start a conversation at that point. GG isn’t perfect but we have done much to prove we aren’t what everyone says we are and yet here we are. I hope this AIRPLAY event goes off with no issue because I believe the SPJ are one of the only legitimate groups out there that will give us a fair chance. So I’ll do whatever I can to make sure that it happens.

You have all forgotten some basic rules and anything resembling common sense.

It’s not about right or wrong in the slightest. It is about holding people accountable to their own standards which they are using to bash you over the head with while doing the opposite.

The morality of the actions is unimportant, these things exist to highlight that these people are consummate and pathological liars who can’t hold themselves even close to the standards they use to witch hunt and shame other people.

Michael, here’s another thing to do, if you want to avoid getting sucked into gamergate’s narrative about “ethics in gaming journalism”. Read the Leigh Alexander piece, and ask yourself if it is in any way unethical. It’s clearly an op-ed piece, and it’s certainly blunt and sarcastic, and much of her writing is. But could anyone other than a thin-skinned hyper-fan think it “inflicts harm”?

You are correct in that no one deserves to be doxed for any reason. Maybe you should explain that to Ms Nyberg. That person has stated that doxing is ok to out people and bring the truth to light. With that being said she is ok with doxxing of so called “enemies”. With her own logic her being doxed is just par for the course. What is never understood by people who condone bad behavior for a “good cause” because it is against bad people. Is it can easily be turned against you by the other side of the cause because you are seen as the bad person. That is what happened to her. If doxxing is good against your enemies, you just might find out you are someones enemy one day.

You have to be able to tell the difference between HARASSMENT and BACKLASH.
Sarah Nyberg has been openly attacking GamerGate with the heaviest possible allegations (being terrorists and such), on a daily basis, for over one year.
You cannot possibly claim that people who backlashed to it by exposing her pedophilia is “harassment”, because harassment presumes the victim of it is not engaging with the alleged harassers.
But Sarah is definitely engaging, every day, on attacks to GamerGate.
You cannot play the harassment card against someone you are harassing, dehumanizing and slandering every day for a year.

So let’s drop this buzzword unless there is a legal harassment lawsuit going on anywhere in this situation, which isn’t the case.

@larryfeltonj – “sucked into gamergate’s narrative”, eh? You argue as if the Alexander piece was the only thing related to ethics. In fact, many GG supporters will tell you that it was not necessarily an ethics breach. Others might argue that attacking the identity many of your readers share might be a breach. And yet others might tell you that she made the step from “reporting the news” to “being the news” – especially in her tweets surrounding that article, where she said quite a few things to that effect herself.

However, since you so specifically bring up whether it inflicted harm: I can tell you right now what harm it inflicted. It made me genuinely consider suicide an option. It made me very much think that if this bullying from dozens of media personalities with huge audiences ever turned on me personally, I might as well off my self, because there doesn’t seem to be a way out. The fear that that might be in the minds of other people is the thing that kept me standing.

Here’s another thing to ask the gamergaters, Michael. Why do they target the relationship between independent developers and the gaming press, rather than follow the money, in AAA development? They make much of the sheer size of the money pool in videogames, but does anyone think that money is in independent development and the press? If I were really looking for corruption in game journalism, I start with people who have the money. Not with marginal indies.

Dead on. I’ve urged him to look over the entire deepfreeze site and draw his own conclusions about how GG defines “ethics.” Hell, most of them admit that they feel ethics is largely about “supporting gamers” and “driving out SJW colonists.”

Ethics does not require a writer to be free of biases, or to pander to one’s audience, or to eliminate their own subjective opinions from opinion pieces like games reviews and broader cultural criticism. Ethics certainly does not require elimination of only one kind of bias that you don’t like.

GG has some valid complaints. But until we’re all willing to adopt a meaningful, rigorous, and honest definition of ethics not driven by ideology, it will be hard for anyone to take even the “ethics” portion of this conversation seriously (forget about all the harassment and other aspects).

The only thing I can say about this situation is that Ralph and ED are rarely lauded as ethical or even reliable by the GG community, especially on /r/KotakuInAction. Ralph used to write the occasional useful piece, but he unapologetically dove into only doing hit pieces. While some people still enjoy reading his stuff, there has been a HUGE backlash against him from GGers. Nyberg didn’t deserve to be doxxed or hacked, but neither did Sony, and the media reported on the “racist” and “sexist” private emails of executives. And at the risk of sounding redundant, Nyberg claiming she was a pedo was done on a public forum. But all that’s irrelevant because it has nothing to do with media ethics. It’s trolls fighting trolls and that is something GG… no, the internet, has had to deal with for a long time, and I’d love for the SPJ conversation to stick to judging the ethics of large publications that claim to be ethical sources of information, news, rather than focusing on wikis and blogs. Their actions have resulted in the untrained and non-accountable general public trying to make up for their failings. So there’s no surprise that ethical failings from random bloggers looking for their 15 minutes of fame. That doesn’t change the fact that there is a larger, more over-arching problem in game and tech journalism.

The vast majority of the hate Sarah Nyberg receives comes from a board on 8chan called behemot which formed after Sarah among others went on a campaign to get 8chan shut down which of cause pissed off the wost kinda of anons.

They hate gamergate as much as they do said group who tried to shut 8chan down.

I try to stay as far away from this conflict as I can because those trolls don’t give a shit who they target or what they do. These are the kinda people who swat people.

I personally refuse to paint a target on my back just to make someone feel better about hitting a bee hive and getting stung. especially sense I’ve used my real name for the past 9 months unlike most of gamergate.

GamerGate does not condone doxxing or harassment. If she was really harassed and doxxed then I obviously don’t condone that. I have no reason to believe that anyone that I’ve talked to over these many months would ever do anything like that. They also don’t condone doxxing or harassment.

Show me one ounce of proof that we in GamerGate coordinated any of these claims and I’ll say GamerGate was wrong to do that. We didn’t do it though, so there is none.

Hi. First time poster here. I’ll be quick.
If you will take A Man in Black seriously, dig around for the other “people in color”.
Sarah Nyberg at least has a confirmed human identity. I’d suggest you focus on people who can confirm their existence beyond an anonimity screen.
Why do I don’t post here under my real name? Because that above is my gamer tag anyway.

I love reading Encyclopedia Dramatica as much as the next guy looking for a good kinda morbid laugh.
But it is not journalism. It is a parody wiki. It is written to be offensive and mix real with false info.
It is –> NOT <– a part of GG and it is not journalism. Come on dude. Do research. This was a easy slip.

Butts and AMIB are trolls. Butts talking about us being pedophiles for having a small hub on 8chan while she is dreaming about fucking small kids is just a sign about how genuine she is.
Its like a priest hating on gays in church and then going to a motel to sniff coke and fuck male hookers.
I do not know why you would go to those people. It is a waste of time.
Go to the real issue. The real people. The journalists who are anti GG.

I know you want both sides but you are getting caught in drama that does not matter.
Butts? doesnt matter. AMIB? doesnt matter. Zoe? doesnt matter. Wu? doesnt matter.
This is about ethics in journalism.
Keep focus.
For the love of god Do. Not. Get. Pulled. In. By. Silly. Drama.

After 8 months of being called every bad name in the book,
Terrorist, harasser, misogynist, transphobic, homophobic, every phobic in the book (and some made up on the spot)
Our harassment is denied, no focus on it. We made a harassment partol and all they focus on is that it is gone now. It is gone because they got harassed and no one gave a shit outside of GG.

We get hated for being Cis straight males and our arguments are not valid because of this. Every conversation goes back to Zoe because anti keep bringing it up when we (excuse my language) dont give a fuck about her.

She was the catalyst that started this. Nothing more. But anti does not want to have a conversation without bringing up misogyny, feminism, things that happened 8 months ago, what trolls say. "Someone said something on 8chan and that is GG's fault".
It is stupid. It is basically down right retarded.

After so many months of being ignored. Harassed without anyone caring. Had racism and sexism thrown at me for being a white straight male, i will NOT apologize to them for anything any troll has ever done. It is not my fault.
I am sick and tired of being ignored and blamed and thrown into a ditch because they are heard and we are not.

We get harassment every day. Sure. Not always directed to me personally. But i see all the hate thrown around. GG being blamed for everything. GG being called sexist and that people are scared we will populate mars! <— true. Search it up.
I am 24 years old. I play video games. I have a mother and a sister.
I am white. I am male. I do not hate women. I do not hate PoC. I do not hate trans people. I am not a harasser, MRA or KKK.
I am a 24 year old man. And i dont want to buy shitty, barely functional, boring games that got a 10/10 because someone sucked a dick or had a monetary relation ship.
"But what about Zoe?!" I. Do. Not Care.
"She got harassed by someone 8 months ago!"
I. Do. Not. Care.
"Do you support these actions?"
I. DO. NOT. CARE. It is not my business.

(Sorry for being aggressive. After 8 months, its a sensitive subject. And many people have a lot bottled up. Good luck with your work.)

But to say “Why pick on the indies?” is dumb. I have to ask, why can’t we scrutinize the indie scene? It’s supposed to be how this industry grows and how game design stars get their start. So why do we just have to let go of collusion, nepotism, and conflicts of interest? Why are people automatically forgiven for their ethical failings because “they don’t make a lot of money.” To ignore them is poor journalism.

“antiGG has some valid complaints. But until we’re all willing to adopt a meaningful, rigorous, and honest definition of harassment not driven by ideology, it will be hard for anyone to take even the “harassment” portion of this conversation seriously (forget about all the ethics and other aspects).”

Well, this post has killed any interest I had in the proposed events in August. Butts and AMIB are A) well known and document trolls and serial harassers, their history of such going much farther back than #GamerGates beginnings and more importantly, B) neither of them are gaming journalists. If those two are going to be considered reliable sources of anything regarding GG or its motivations then you might as well ask us to take responsibility and apologize for GNAA while you’re at it.
I refuse to acknowledge or apologize for actions I was not involved in. I refuse to lower my own moral stance to an even plane with anonymous trolls who have been fanning the flames on both sides for months. And I refuse to give a damn about any preliminary fact finding that would look at the the miles long list of detestable acts conducted by Butts and AMIB before and during GG and still give any relevance to what either have to say . You want to know why the harassment patrol died? Because no matter how many troll accounts we shut down, Butts and AMIB repeatedly accused the group of being nothing more than a PR stunt on the part of GG to hide or cover up our supposed harassment activities. And then, when Butts came to GG asking for help from the harassment patrol, it put her in the crosshairs of baphomet, with whom we are not affiliated, and she raged all the more at us for not being able to come to her aid when she’d been saying all along that we helped nobody and was just for show. That’s who you’re asking us to apologize to. No thank you sir.

Remember Matt Taylor’s shirt? Remember all the glorified bloggers who demonstrated zero empathy for this man and doubled down when they received blowback? Go look at the tweets from that period, see how tolerant these people who “oppose harassment” really are.

Face it, journalism is dead and the internet killed it. Here you are, unable to accurately gauge the size, scope and intent of people whose words and behavior are all public. You don’t even need to leave your house anymore, yet it’s still not enough.

You don’t understand and you don’t try to understand. You keep telling people to play by rules your own profession stopped following a while ago, and blame us for your colleagues collective ignorance.

I don’t apologize for things i didn’t do, and i don’t denounce things i had nothing to do with.

Journalism is dead because of the Daily Mail/Gawker model is now the way every site is going.

Look at something like Salon, it was never like that totally, but now is 100% clickbait outrage stoking.

Journalists are not getting paid for great stories, they are getting paid for clicks. Otherwise why would Jessica Valenti still be employed, further evidence that the Daily Mail model has forced even the Guardians hand

I have, like many others, stopped trying to engage with these sort of actors on social media. They are merely looking for examples to cherry pick and take out of context to retweet and shame.

Worse yet, they rarely engage anyone making solid points. They choose to engage the people who take them overly serious and goad them into irrational discourses.

The best thing you can do is laugh at them and move on, because taking them seriously will have a negative effect on your mental health.

To me #GamerGate is JUST a topic, not a side. These people are as much a part of gamergate (and part of the reason it has such a bad name) as those who are arguing about better ethics. Sadly they post in the exact same tag more often then most of the “ethics” crowd, but claim to be above it.

I grow weary of the odd layers of identity applied to this subject, and why they have any bearing on the validity of claims being made. “Gamer” was the identity that was under attack, all this pro-GG/anti-GG identity garbage is disposable.

My stance is if you use the #GamerGate tag, you are part of the #GamerGate discussion, for better or worse is up to your own behavior.

Everyone else simply doesn’t care, doesn’t talk about GG, and has no interest in the topic.

“If another Sarah Nyberg-like atrocity happens between now and AirPlay, let 10,000 posts like the one on Reddit decry her doxing.”

I hope you will be saying the same thing to the anti side. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a single post on GamerGazhi distance them self from doxxing someone on the pro side. Actually, I think I recall a couple of times, where a few actually incouraged it!

To be honest, the reason a case like Sarah happened, is not only on Gamergates shoulders. The press carries some of the responsibility for creating an eviroment, where a few people stupid actions, gets a decent amount of “backing” from regular people.

When people don’t want to listen, you are getting slandered in the media, and you have someone spending her entire day taking tweets, trying to character assasinate individuals, people will get frustrated.

what she was doing is not illigal, and noone wanted to represent gamergate fairly, and as such, a few people tried to silence her in a very bad way.

But frustration does cause people to act irrational.

I still don’t think it’s a fair tactic, (Unlike Movie BoBs “There are no bad tactic, only bad targets!”) but I understand why some people might think it’s okay, out of pure frustration.

I would like to hear the anti sides committees answer to why they didn’t call out that it was an aweful tactic when it happened to Lizzy? She even had her kids doxxed, which might be the only way to make a doxxing even worse than the one Sarah got.

My point is, most of gamergate is rational people, and many people do express that openly. Anti only focus on those that doesn’t, while gladly ignoring harrassement, when it happens to thier opposition.

They can bring forth Sarah as thier “look GG is only about harrassement” shield, but considering that they ignored Lizzys doxx, who didn’t spend up to 16 hours a day for several month doing Character assasinations, (and didn’t harrassed anyone for that matter) is appaling.

On amib, he’s had that conversation with me, had the benefit of the doubt and left me with none concerning his character. I have personal experience that his word means nothing, on butts, she should of course not be harassed or threatened, that aside I care not a jot for her.

You are quick to say in butt’s case that harassment even as a retaliation, is never morally justified. It certainly wouldn’t be legal, but moral is applied wrongly. In amib’s case you are quick to justify or excuse his behaviour because he had a friend, I saw no moral hand wringing here. I have been quick to support both you and especially the talk, this apparent bias (erring on the side of decency) however gives me pause.

Nether merit apology or even recognition in my book, they are both vile and base, but I’ll bite down my bile and extend an apology to both, once you likewise secure the apologies I and the rest of GamerGate are due.

Once again, this post has moved me from cautiously optimistic, to suspicious. If your neutral, professional and unbiased you can be trusted, please be better and help us get the truth out. I’ll paraphrase you we don’t have to like you, but we have to respect that you’ll be a professional.

This is exactly why us anti-GG are not very interested in this debate. The “Free GG background check” is terrifying. The thought that people will rip apart my personal life looking for anything to demonize me is horrifying. People would try and hack everything I have looking for anything. People here in the comments are just trying to justify the actions against her which is disgusting.

One of the most frustrating things about this discussion is that both sides speak as though they are debating opposite sides of an issue when in fact they are arguing separate issues entirely, and by people who don’t necessarily even care about the other sides issues.

Gamergate is made up of people who love games, and are worried that a small clique of ideologues are amassing enough influence to constrain what is acceptable content in games in the future. Corruption in games journalism is one tool this clique has in their kit, so Gamergaters believe that rooting out corruption can help turn the tide. Our argument is that corruption and censorship is wrong, and that we as consumers will move away from sites that fail to create and abide by ethics policies. We don’t necessarily have an opinion about online abuse, but many of us oppose it but accept it as the way the internet is.

Anti-gamergate, from my observations, is made up of people who have longstanding concerns about online abuse, in particular abuse coming from misogynistic MRAs. This includes true believers of the SJW cult, but also includes far more moderate people, including those that believe in individual rights over “social justice.” Their argument is that harassers need to knock it the hell off. They don’t necessarily care about games or have an opinion about ethics in games journalism, but many of them would probably agree that conflicts of interest (for example) should be avoided.

There is nothing about the actual positions of either side that bring them into conflict with each other. Most of us probably even agree with the other side’s actual position, we just have very different priorities about what issues matter to us. But this gets lost because the “debate” between straw men is so intense.

So let’s have that conversation about ethics. If people want to talk about stopping harassment too, OK, fine, you will have my support when that discussion is had. But it’s not THIS discussion. After all, this is being hosted by the SPJ, not the “Society against online douchbaggery.” The topic should concern the profession of journalism.

The only people that benefit from a conversation about journalistic ethics being derailed are unethical journalists. It sure as hell doesn’t help gamers, and it doesn’t help the SPJ or the profession as a whole.

She is an open pedophile, who railed against 8chan with false accusations, of child porn and got the Admin thrown of his lifelines of income.

She doxes, harrases, dogpiles, lies, defames. She is 100% obsessed, more than any other pro or anti -gg person.

I someone doubt a lovely person such as yourself would warrant anyone even bothering your public record. Speak up, and speak out for what you believe in, but don’t push hysterics masquerading as concern

Is Ubisoft an ‘indie’? Wasn’t it exposed how someone reporting for PC Gamer was doing articles on UBisoft & his girlfriend was working for them?

Follow the money, huh? Most times it’s led us to Patreon. The big publishers don’t deal on Patreon. Otherwise the “marketing cash in exchange for positive coverage” has been proven time and time again.

@anon dev: Tell you what then. You think that it’s GG that’s the scariest? I’d have to thoroughly disagree. You know as well as I that the really scary ones are the ones that can bully others out in the open. So tell me anon dev. How many in GG have to go under burner accounts and hide? Quite a few yes?

Here’s another area where the harassment narrative starts to fall apart by the way: Okay, so harassment’s happening right? You want the difference? The bulk of the harassment is done by burner accounts, but it’s the ones not in hiding that are most concerning. On that level, certain individuals have been benefiting greatly from the threat narrative, especially if they can contribute to it(For example, ben kuchera attempting to get a guy fired for disagreeing with him). I’m well aware of that chilling effect at play though.

I think this is a very difficult topic for many people in #GamerGate. Obviously I’m very sorry about what happened to Ms. Nyberg and I hope it never happens again.

That said, as a female member of #GamerGate I have been the target of abuse, threats and harassment by so called “feminists” and others opposing #GamerGate. These have been encouraged by a group of twitter users with a large reach who have been dehumanising and vilifying us all from the start. Ms. Nyberg is one of those users who has always promoted abuse of female #GamerGate users as “a lesser (moral) offence”: https://archive.is/0lBWF (24/10/2014)

I’m disabled, a domestic abuse survivor & considered a vulnerable person so I may be more sensitive to these things than many others. However, not one of the gaming press outlets ever covered the threats of mutilation, rape & death aimed at us. Every single one has encouraged the behaviour by describing us all as misogynistic, rape supporting woman haters. Many of us are very tired and distressed. How much less could we be worth to any of these people? So I find it somewhat unsurprising that some people have, very wrongly, attacked people.

Thank you again for hosting the debate. Communication is the only way to move forward.

@larry
“Here’s another thing to ask the gamergaters, Michael. Why do they target the relationship between independent developers and the gaming press, rather than follow the money, in AAA development?”

This is simple. The Games Journalists are the ones in the know. THEY are the ones that should be telling gamers when there is corruption. Sadly, they are currently dealing with corruption they have with “Indie Developers”, Once the people that are KNOWN to be corrupt are out, gamers can move on to the bigger fish with the Ethical journalists leading the charge against further corruption.

And gamers have pointed out that corruption before. Years ago and the more recent (just before GamerGate started) DoritoGate. You know what happened when gamers tried to go after that big AAA corruption? The GAMING JOURNALISTS told Gamers to shut up about it.

I guess this marks the end of keeping focused on actual issues. Lets spend the time hurling around unprovable accusations of easily faked crimes instead! I’m sure if we just give the trolls, on either side or third party, enough attention, that’ll make them go away, right?

I won’t say that there’s no risk to attending Airplay. The last time that GG had a meetup, there was a bomb threat that the FBI reported to the local police. Some people go apeshit when they’re convinced that a ‘hate group’ is having a meet-up. I don’t think it’s LIKELY that anything bad will happen (more likely, there’ll just be threats, since aGGros are crazy), but I won’t rule it out either.

Mods can (and do) remove dox posted on /gamergateHQ/ and KotakuInAction. We can’t stop people from doing shit on Twitter, we sure as hell can’t stop people from posting whatever they want on other boards/subs, and we can’t stop anyone from making harassing phone calls.

Doxing, threats, or promoting threats fall under the general prohibitions against shilling:
“‘Shilling’ is hereby defined as detrimental shitposting that can be reasonably expected to have a real, harmful effect on the ability of #GG to accomplish its goals and which provides nothing else of concrete value. See also: Defeatism, shit-stirring, dramafagging, inter-board bitchfighting, intentional and repeated thread derailment, spamming, advocating risky, self-defeating and counterproductive ideas that have previously been rejected by the community, blackhatting, actual harassment, actual threats, doxxing, impersonating, and false flagging.”

What usually happens when we try to explain this shit is that people think we’re either justifying the harassment, or focusing on a less important issue. Explaining that people are operating on false assumptions isn’t justifying anything, these claims HAVE been detrimental to many people both personally and professionally, and by assigning blame improperly, people actually help the trolls.

Regarding Sarah, that’s tricky. The posts actually were deleted several times on GGHQ before they finally allowed it, but too many people have a hateboner for her to suppress stuff like that for long, and GG folks have a firm distaste for censorship. Plenty saw it as absurdly hypocritical that she’s talked about having pedophilic desires and apparently talked about having an encrypted hard drive full of CP when she tried to get 8chan shut down by claiming 8chan had the same shit.

She and AMIB have both been significant forces in convincing other people that I’m a terrorist, misogynist, racist, and pedophile, so it’s tough to get myself to defend either. I think almost anyone would feel the same after being demonized, and seeing their friends demonized, for shit that they had nothing to do with, and often actively opposed.

“Here’s a true test of GamerGate’s commitment: Tell A Man in Black you understand. Calmly and politely tell this man you despise: l’ll do my best to prove you wrong.”

Many people have been called out for harassment for this kind of statement. I’m not trying to be cute here. Signaling others, implicitly or not, to engage with someone outside GG is considered harassment. It’s called sealioning. I’d remove the above statement to avoid further conflict from the AGG camp.

I hate to say it, but given that Sarah Butts regularly makes provably false statements regarding GamerGate, I’d have to say fact checking here is a necessity.

And I hate that I even have to say that. I hate that I don’t have enough trust in my fellow person to simply believe that such horrible acts happened to her.

Which is probably a horrible way to begin my post given what I’m going to say next:

Back in September, October, and November, there were what seemed like dozens of reports of “GamerGaters” getting their employers called with lies of drug use/pedophilia/violent behavior/ect.. and/or exaggerations to get them fired from their jobs. Some people were. One of them is a friend of mine that ended up homeless for around 5 months as a result.

Back in October, my friend was in the hospital (for reasons unrelated to GamerGate). During her stay, she got a call from someone she believed was her doctor who proceeded to socially engineer her medical information out of her. She didn’t think anything of it until she got a phone call from her employer several weeks later. Her employer had apparently received a phone call from someone who recited her private medical info, but ostensibly in an exaggerated manner that misrepresented the severity of her illness. Her employer then stopped assigning her any hours. No hours meant no pay. No pay meant not being able to pay rent. She ended up living out of her car for approximately 5 months. I ended up sending her $1100~ so she could afford deposit on a place to live, a month’s rent, utilities, and food. She thankfully has since been able to get a new job to sustain her living expenses, so she has since recovered.

She doesn’t want to assume this was the fault of someone from “anti-GamerGate”. She was tired of the conflict. However, given that she openly supported GamerGate, many reports of people having employers contacted to get them fired cropped up frequently in the September through November timeframe, and that she had her employer contacted in October, the circumstantial evidence points to this originating from someone with an ideological grudge against supporters of GamerGate.

For any reporters who may be interested in following up on this to verify the veracity, message me on Twitter on @livebeef so I can privately send you verifiable info (and my friend’s contact info if she consents).

My last comment isn’t here, not sure if there has been mistake so here it is. We’ve gone out of our way to try and “fix” our PR problem and it’s impossible.

If you people presume I support doxing, swatting or whatever then I’m sorry but I can’t take you seriously. I’m not a professional, I’m just a normal everyday consumer who wants sites that are meant to be neutral when reporting products to be as objective as humanly possible.

But if truly care about doxing, trolls and harassment then I would ask you to instead of pointing the finger at people who haven’t done anything (unless you can prove it) and instead investigate these people.

ttp://i.imgur.com/gLEkquE.png

Now your going to see a pattern with one of those names, notice how they’re laughing about playing both sides? As I’ll show not the actual people involved but rather their fans.

ttp://i.imgur.com/vfLII4a.png

Bit odd that someone who is being harassed would tweet “Come get some free games guys!” and RT the bribe, wouldn’t you say?

How about this:

Notice that this troll has both the troll who bribed others to send death threats to Zoe Quinn but Brianna Wu is following him.

A ton of death threats using the GamerGate # followed by “No (one) is allowed to speak about anymore, I want clarify our position no hate here.” again, very very strange.

Finally there is this:

Clearly, this guy is NOT on our side.

What about the recent Dox that happened to Wu?

ttp://i.imgur.com/WQWXJrc.png

Why would GamerGate call itself all of these horrible names? We’re masochists, sure but we’re not that bad!

Finally I wanted to bring this to your attention, this is what happens when GamerGate tries to help our critics.

ttp://i.imgur.com/wtYScfT.png

We get more smearing, there is simply no pleasing them. We’re the bad guys yet their idols are working with trolls and no one will report on it or talk about it.
So if we’re going to derail the conversation to harassment and not ethics in games journalism, can we talk about these first?

One of these is all over the news over harassment and the other is in charge of a charity trying to fight harassment and we have much much more on them. Might want to look into this group:

“Funny, that’s what people told me about your side a week ago. I always believe in trying to talk.”

I applaud you for continuing with that attitude. Look into TMIB and Nyberg and see what you find.

If people are reacting rather, ah, strongly, to seeing you mention TMIB and Nyberg is because, unlike a nebulous, leaderless, no-entry Hashtag campaign, it actually IS possible to say that TMIB and Nyberg have been definitively involved in harassment and doxxing, it IS actually possible to point to them as /individuals/ as judge their behavior. And seeing how TMIB and Nyberg have been two of the more active individuals in “assigning targets” (again, this is something that can actually be proven, because we are talking about specific people) it’s gonna rub some people the wrong way.

But, please keep going and please know that though there are going to be a lot of people working their hardest to make this panel not work, I will be doing all I can to make sure that it does.

I hope that you eventually get to my post. Like others, I am a GamerGate supporter.
My reasons for joining were because someone who enjoys games in all their myriad forms was left distraught at the articles that came out.
This person was someone with a learning disability and limited reasoning meaning that although he is biologically an adult, he has the understanding of a 14year old.

I missed the ‘zoepost’ thing when it was breaking – I had the benefit of hindsight with some of the articles and was able to make up my own mind of the then-nascent GamerGate movement.

There are things within that video I have yet to do, it was an ambitious statement of fact, some of which has been limited by funding and technical constraints and others which have continued in other forms.

To see what became of the the Shooting Straight series, it continued here:

This is the YouTube playlist which I have been able to do elsewhere in my own time and with my own equipment and which has been produced on YouTube since #sadpuppies was around.

All this gives you the context of how long I’ve been involved and shows, along with
@VoiceOfTheForge on Twitter the arguments I’ve been making.

You can see that I have condemned bad behaviour on both sides since my involvement, but the stance has shifted to become more critical of the aGG side as their bad faith and notoriety grow.

You will see that I cover the #CalgaryExpo and the Honey Badger Brigade, the bomb threat sent to the #GGinDC meetup and other behaviours which are more in line with the MSM narrative – but whose stories are on the wrong side and targeting the wrong people.

Let me make one final thing clear: #GamerGate-rs are just people. Ordinary people who wish to more ethical and fair journalism, including the removal of Op-Ed pieces passed off as reviews, news or other unfair gate-keeping keeping those who don’t share a biased narrative out of the industry.

They want the best games out there, with the best stories, the best characters and the best gameplay.

They don’t want bland, insipid characters shoe-horned in for the sake of Tokenism or ideology. Just the same as Sci-Fi fans don’t want a hegemonic panel excluding voices as we saw in #sadpuppies.

You can disagree, take me task.

All I ask is that you engage honestly, and I will openly and honestly debate with you.

You may have other viewpoints, but where they differ vastly from my own, I will ask for your evidence, or I will invoke my right to employ Hitchen-esque rhetoric.

A fair discussion, a fair hearing, fair treatment is most of #GamerGate want.

The Nyberg thing is really a non-factor. Butts isn’t a journalist, dev, or critic and doesn’t deserve to be mentioned at all. Anita and others in the anti-GG circle are trying to pass notability/credibility down the chain, but look how well that (hasn’t) worked for Randi Harper.

Essentially, it’s a way of trying to point out that somehow, Anita et. al. are culpable for Butts, which is a weak argument. It’s weak when they say it about GG, it’s equally weak used against GG. AMIB is technically a low-level journo, so he’s semi-notable.

The reality is, arguing about politics (and just about anything else, it seems) on the internet as a public figure gets you harassed. GG has its horror stories, anti-GamerGate has its horror stories. The biggest difference between the two sides is that GG has a positive message, and the other side want to blame GamerGate for the very nature of the internet in order to silence them.

I also have to add that Ralph Retort is pretty widely considered to be the dredges of “GG journalism”. It is sensationalist and clickbaity.

But as much as I despise it, the article on Nyberg you linked to is the clearest example of what is pissing people off about GG in general. We have some really disgusting statements made by Nyberg. Really vile things, but there are no journalists writing that people who are “against GameGate” need to “condemn” her or “distance themselves”.

It’s just very hard to see 8 months of people complaining about things like Joss Whedon’s writing in Avengers: Age of Ultron and NOT hear anything about people who, /in the open/, organize efforts to call people’s employers and try to get them fired.

I take every opportunity to condemn harassment, even when it’s perpetrated by anonymous, hateful individuals with no conceivable way to be held accountable by me.

When I see actual, identifiable individuals doing things in the name of opposing GamerGate and not getting any kind of negative response from the people who demand that I somehow police a hashtag, I get frustrated.

I would like to suggest avoiding the conflation of leaking public information (However malicious or harmful the act) and outright hacking. Beyond that? Bravo.

I find your commitment to listening to all sides laudable and encourage you to continue it. My loathing of the behavior of many, as well as the actions that inspire it, amount to NO reason to wish they went unheard.

I challenge ideas and open mine to challenge so that I may grow. I condemn harassment regardless of the source and target. Defamation of as illogical a kind as what is being thrown around here is best dealt with through honest discourse that allows allegations to be logically and peacefully disproven.

“I’m taking a big personal risk believing most GamerGaters agree with what I’ve just written and the committee has just said — that harassment is not only wrong but stupid. If you want to win hearts and minds, you don’t clench your fists.”

Consider this one more voice of the GamerGate revolt agreeing with this notion. For what little one can do from behind a screen and keyboard, I’ve got your back on this.

My first reaction to any claims that GamerGate is primarily a movement of harassment is the visceral, gut reaction to having been done a terrible wrong. That isn’t me! That isn’t us. We do not do that!

I find myself standing firmly between two improbable possibilities, and I cannot for the life of me come to conclude which I think more likely to be true.

One the one hand is the possibility that these people truly believe this harassment is coming from GamerGate. To me this is astoundingly farfetched, for I spend a great portion of every day interacting with GamerGate supporters on twitter, and reading and posting on KotakuInAction. None of these people harass. It is difficult to imagine them ever stooping to it. It is impossible to imagine anyone looking at these conversations and seeing these people as harassers.

That leaves me with the other improbability: People are deliberately, willfully, and maliciously lying when they claim that GamerGate is primarily about harassment. What else could I be left with to believe?

Anyone who has spent a significant portion of time on the internet (and absolutely everyone involved in either side of GamerGate has) knows that the actions of anonymous trolls are impossible to curtail. Attributing them to one group or another is at best an act of utter casuistry.

Still, it is indisputably in the interests of those which GamerGate opposes to deflect and deny. Is it really so difficult to imagine them, in feigned hysteria, pointing to the few tweets of lone bad actors and screaming bloody murder?

There is one thing I am convinced of beyond all else. My GamerGate has nothing to fear from the truth, and we desperately need AirPlay to reveal it. I am relatively sure that anti-GamerGate agitators will make attempts to derail this process to reveal the truth, and I am certain that unaffiliated bad actors will take matters into their own hands.

I arrive then at my plea: Stand fast against attempts to discredit a legitimate movement. If we can get through AirPlay, we can clear our name once and for all. That is all that many of us want anymore.

“He has a friend who spoke out against GamerGate and suffered mightily for it.”

This is something we hear quite frequently, but rarely substantiated. Especially when we see people who are doing media interviews claiming to have been “forced to flee their home”, when said interview is taking place in their home office. So we need to take their claims with a pretty big grain of salt.

I think one big problem you’re going to find with this debate is that the two sides do not exist in the same reality. It’s not a difference of opinion, policy, or politics. Both sides live inside their respective bubbles. It’s a phenomenon we’ve been seeing more and more in politics.

Most famously, during the last presidential debate, Mitt Romney had been so far in the right-wing bubble that he was willing to accuse the President of not having called the attack on Benghazi terrorism. (The infamous “Proceed, Governor” moment) It’s all but impossible to have a debate when the two sides cannot even agree on basic facts.

On one side, you have a group saying that it is fighting journalistic corruption. The other side claims the first is nothing but a hate movement toward women and minorities.

You can’t have a debate on those grounds. GG will point out many incidences of documented corruption and defend itself by pointing to its MANY women and minority members, including prominent voices like Oliver Campbell, Mercedes Carrera, and Milo Yanopoulis. (If we really were the KKK, it’d be like having a black guy and a jewish woman as prominent spokespeople) aGG will agree that corruption is bad, but will dismiss it as small fry compared to GG’s misogyny and racism and that any women/minorities in GG are all sock puppets, or have internalized misogyny, or are simply evil people.

How does a diverse group prove that it is not a “hate” movement, when anyone can log into a message board or twitter and post something hateful? We’ve seen MANY instances of aGG folks trolling themselves, for instance. There’s one instance of a guy taking a screenshot of a hateful message before he had clicked the “Post” button, which you can clearly see in the screenshot. Another instance, had someone who had forgotten to switch to their sock puppet account and had posted trolling comments towards themselves from their own account. http://imgur.com/a/cxHc9 has quite a few of these, if you’re interested.

In your first post about this, you posted a pair of very obvious hate twitter messages that anyone in GG instantly recognized as trolls. (They’re the same folks that successfully trolled Buzzfeed, which wrote an article about their “baltimore loot crew” nonsense) We’re told we need to prove they aren’t GG. How could anyone do that? They also posted under the SPJethicsweek hashtag. Does that make them part of the SPJ?

And the real claims of corruption get lost. Because nobody wants to be labeled a misogynist, GG is put into a box of constantly trying to prove it isn’t evil against people who have no moral qualms about fabricating evidence.

Is this about the potential serious breach of ethics among journalists or pointless online drama? I’m amazed a whole article is dedicated to one character who has nothing to do with journos. This is a complete distraction! You are a better man than this, Journo Terrorist.

Be aware that the anti side will just come back with accusations of harassment again and again, obfuscating to the point that they may never actually address the journalism issues.

There is a swirling, ongoing playground fight with each side seeing their harassment of the other as self-defense, or righteous attack. You must rise above this. Focus on the professionals. I hope you can, because getting your hands dirty in the melee will serve no-one.

The supporters of #gamergate have facts, evidence, and reason. Those opposed to #gamergate have their feelings, their hateful narrative, and their bigoted, authoritarian ideology. That is it. Anyone who honestly reviews all the evidence out there can only come to this conclusion. The vast majority of harassment supposedly coming from #gamergate is the work of childish trolls who have nothing better to do than sow discord on meaningful issues where there is already a seed of disagreement, but the anti’s refuse to look at the evidence for what it is, choosing instead to continue to believe their hateful narrative with a cult-like fervor, blocking anyone who tries to convince them of the truth and casting out fellow ideologues who even briefly entertain the notion of communicating with the opposition in good faith. There is no reasoning with these people.

Then don’t ask GamerGate, Ask Totalbiscuit about the ethical standards within the industry. Ask, RazorFist, Ask AngryJoe, ask Jim Sterling, ask why consumers have taken a back seat while Journalists in the gaming industry have decided their readers are no longer relevant or deserve to be protected. In the end, it doesn’t matter though, Kotaku, Polygon, Gamasutra, Destructoid, these sites are dying because of their unethical practices to force a narrative within the industry.

My point, don’t ask GamerGate if you don’t want to, ask consumers why they’ve left these sites in droves and get their information from Youtubers instead. For me, it was an easy choice, I am sick of being lied to.

After that, since I knew that she would try to do the same thing again (harassers usually target the same thing again when they are successful the first time), I camped out on the future stream chats so I could stop her from harassing again. As expected, she did in fact try again on the future streams, doing the exact same thing as before. When she tried to do it, I acted and disarmed her from harassing in the chat (her method of harassment is fairly easy to stop when you know how it works and you cannot be blocked). When she realized that her harassment methods weren’t going to work on that stream anymore after a few tries, she stopped trying.

Now, the average length of those streams is 4-5 hours. That’s a lot of time that I spent trying to prevent one person from harassing on one platform toward one target. So, when I say I condemn harassment, I’m letting my actions speak for this. This cannot be said of A Man in Black and Sarah Nyberg, who claim it as well, but then engage in it by misrepresenting and gaslighting others in order to get them dog-piled and harassed.

It also speaks to the futility of trying to stop it, since that was a lot of time spent doing so in a small niche with favorable conditions to do so. I cannot stop her on Twitter, since if I tried to do the same thing, she would block me immediately. It’s more useful for me to be able to work in the background to try to disarm her, but even then it’s somewhat futile due to how Twitter works.

In any case, when people constantly harass and act maliciously without any recourse taken against them, outside people are going to take notice and act. That’s where the ED article came from; the writer had nothing to do with GamerGate, and just noticed a terrible person that they could get information via Google write about it. I, nor anyone in GamerGate, is responsible for it, and expecting any of us to be required to say anything about it is asinine.

Furthermore, if this is another bad faith approach to get something out of GamerGate (as with John Smith’s position on the panel) or to appease anti-GamerGate, expect hostility, especially from a group that has been constantly approached in bad faith. There is a rumor that at least one comment has been censored on this site showing evidence that these people claiming harassment have been colluding with third-parties to false flag harassment, which lends some credence to my bad faith claim.

So, my response to this is as follows:

1. Stop these bad faith games. It’s just going to burn bridges and engender more chaos and bitterness in the end, even if your end intentions are good. There are good faith alternatives that you could use to prove your points.

2. If you are censoring comments on your site because what they say is inconvenient to your goals, stop that as well. Censorship of valid comments and opinions is what ignited GamerGate in the first place, and doing this is only going to make everything that you claim to be against, including the harassment and its environment, worse.

Did butts write this? Holy shit he sounds like a whiney child who’s made as fuck that he can’t sit with the popular kids at lunch. I’m down as fuck to try and school his ass.
Make good Infographs to spam twitter and force all aggros who stood by her to respond.

After discussion of GamerGate was banned in 4chan, a sizable number of GG investigators migrated to the then-year-old 8chan (@infinitechan), run by Fredrick Brennan aka Hotwheels (@HW_BEAT_THAT). HW takes a very 1st-Amendment, hands-off approach to running his site, and immense efforts have been leveled against him in order to coerce him into evicting GamerGate discussion. To whit…

Near the end of 2014 and into early 2015 a concerted effort was made to paint 8chan as a hive of pedophilia, which to a certain extent it true relatively speaking; because it’s so free speech, 8chan attracts less savory sorts, though child porn (CP) itself is banned for legal reasons. The criterion is simply that; illegality isn’t allowed on 8chan, but anything not strictly legal is allowed, which includes discussing pedophilia and non-pornographic images of children.

In short, someone posted CP on 8chan and alerted an anti-GamerGate personality Dan Olson (@FoldableHuman), who proceeded to make a blog post about it (including blurred-out alleged CP) instead of, y’know, calling the FBI or something, which Sarah and other gleefully spread as “GamerGate is full of pedophiles/pedophile enablers because they won’t denounce 8chan”. Then followed petitioning Patreon to remove HW from their service (depriving a heavily disabled man’s sole source of income just in time for Christmas) and eventually nuking his Gratipay account as well on similar grounds of “he’s toxic, associated with CP, grrrr”, a Directed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) which largely crippled 8chan for several days, and getting the site’s domain address (temporarily) pulled by its registrar, again on the back of the “8chan = CP” argument.

So when anti-GamerGate rally around an outed pedophile and refuse to denounce them, well, GamerGaters cry foul.

Speaking of the GamerGate Harassment Patrol, have you asked Sarah’s opinion of them? Because she staunchly believed that they exist TO harass, not TO PREVENT harassment. The GGHP won’t be resurrected any time soon specifically for that reason; many anti-GG people hide behind a 10k+ strong blockbot and are mortally offended by seeing anything pro-GG. Sarah’s entire “shtick” for the last 9 months has been to stalk every info feed, via Twitter, Reddit, Xchans, etc. for anything that can be construed, in or out of context as reflecting negatively on GG, and posting it to her followers, typically in the format of “GG believes X, GG is about Y, GG condones Z, etc”.

She’s a propagandist. Literally, by definition, a propagandist.

Has she been harassed? Certainly, anyone of any note in this space opera has been, and I condemn it as much as I condemn the harassment of Liz Finnigan, Cannoness Julie, Anita Sarkeesian, King of /pol/, Brianna Wu, Milo Yianopoulos, Zoe Quinn, and Jason Miller. But beyond that, there’s little I or GamerGate can do; trolls (such as the GNAA, 8chan’s /Baphomet/ board, etc) can and will continue to false flag, either under GG’s name or simply implicitly, because to anti-GG’s minds, anything bad that happens to them is done by GamerGate. As Larry Correia (@monsterhunter45) put it, they “look for GamerGate under their beds at night”. The GGHP floundered because, with very few exceptions, it was tremendous work with little or no reward; few antiGGers acknowledged their works as good, they were expected to police effectively the entire internet, and it was just a massive waste of time in the long run trying to be the big damn heroes to an ungrateful, hateful crowd. And Sarah didn’t help, because *SHE DENOUNCED THEM*. Then cried for their help when /baphomet/ went after her. She wanted GGs (look for #NotYourSword) help during that, but after? Nope, right back to “harassed by GG”.

Sarah is, behind perhaps only A Man in Black, the primary reason that rank-and-file aGGros have not been willing to engage peaceably with GamerGate, because their sole connection to GG has been via the proxy of agent provocateurs. Sarah has been engaging GGers since the beginning, and she’s proven utterly intractable. Ask Rexia (@TechyFolks) what happens when you try to show Sarah sympathy; she uses it to attack GamerGate. She contradicts herself constantly, engages only low-information posters and avoids well-informed ones, condones doxing, and has engaged in flagrant, rank hypocrisy.

“Those who disagree say Nyberg’s hacked personal accounts reveal she’s probably a pedophile. My reply: Then call the cops. That’s what a responsible citizen does. But what about a responsible journalist?”
being a pedophile is NOT illegal, being a child molester is, a pedophile is someone who is ATTRACTED to kids, not a choice, hating a pedophile for being attracted to kids is like hating a guy for being attracted to other guys, attraction is not a choice. Most of the SJW’s who say GG is a hate group are radical extremists, so forgive me if I hope to god that they will stay away from this panel or it’s going to be a real damn waste of your time and resources, the panel is about Journalism, not harassment, and I hope, I hope to god this is what I’ll be hearing and not a damn shit flinging dramaqueen play, journalism will be worse of, we will be worse of, and the only one winning will be the third party trolls having the lulz of their life.

With that out of the way now for some meat in my comment I dragged myself kicking and screaming through this update, both A man in black and sarah nyberg is a troll. sarah nyberg spends most of her time screencapping things out of context and puts it on twitter which is why I basically don’t want anything to do with her, it’s drama all over.

The first two sources you cited – the ralph retort and encyclopedia dramatica(ED) – are not news sites, ralph retort is a blog, he has his style of writing and as you said, free speech is a bitch. ED is basically a troll lore wiki written in a satiric chan style tone, judging people by how they write is a fallacy as it does not address their actual ideas, the worst thing about ED is that if you understand the context through chan culture language, it’s correct, it’s factual, which is a damn embarassment for wikipedia.

We’ve been decrying bad behavior for over nine months now, and let me tell you, it gets damn fucking tirering getting shit flung at you for stuff you did not do, for getting told to take responsibility, for getting told we’re the harassers, for getting told it’s our fault, for getting told we’re a hate group, GG has done everything to try making things better, those who call us a hate group has done jack shit, GamerGate has donated more than 200k to charity, those who call us a hate group has donated nothing, we’ve been doxxed, our families sent death threats, Milo specifically got a syringe with some strange stuff in it sent to him, he got a dead animal with a razor blade stuck in it’s neck sent to his mail, yet if one little tweet hurts an SJW’s precious feelings it gets worldwide media attention, anything happening to any of us? All you hear is crickets, yet somehow we’re the ones with the burden of having to defend ourselves from baseless accusations all the frigging time. We can’t prevent a third party troll from doing what they want, it’s simply not in our power, we’ve said doxing, harassment, threats, etc. is bad and people should not do it yet we get asked to say it over and over and over.

A man in black talked about how a friend got “harassed” for speaking out against GamerGate, for an SJW, harassment is a moving goal post, one day they’ll say dissent is harassment, unless they do it, another day they’ll say speaking to my friend in a way they don’t like is harassing them, unless they do it. Not only that, but speaking out in this whole thing puts you on a target list, doesn’t matter what your stance is, I will mention two incidents.

A person spoke out that said all #GamerGate supports deserved to be led to a gas chamber and choked to death with comments about opening auswitch again, a neutral told the person that shit ain’t right, for being a decent human being the neutral had sent threats to him and his family, from SJW’s, and apparantly it was justified because he was a misogynist, why was he a misogynist? For saying we shouldn’t be gassed to death.

One dox against a pro-gamergater included their children, where they went to school, their parents, a really thorough dox, threats then ensued against their children, about going to their school if they wouldn’t shut up about GamerGate, now this Pro-GG’er dares not to speak out anymore in fear of their kids.

“Here’s a true test of GamerGate’s commitment: Tell A Man in Black you understand. Calmly and politely tell this man you despise: l’ll do my best to prove you wrong.” No I won’t, as I said before we’ve been saying that for nine months, I’m not interested.
You said a man in black is a troll, and ask us to talk to him to prove him wrong, if you knew how the internet worked, how trolls work, you would be able to see why this is not only stupid but a waste of time.

“didn’t want me to write this post at all, fearing it’s a troll magnet that’ll “lead us down the rabbit hole and into Hell.” It’s certainly a risk, but it’s also a summons to both sides: You have the power to keep it civil. Your whispers can be quite loud.” you shouldn’t have, this IS a troll magnet, by listening to SJW’s and writing about harassment instead of staying on topic with ethics and journalistic practices you invited the trolls by giving them attention, you wrote in your initial post you don’t believe the accusations, it then turned to hosting the air panel, the details on it, things were looking great, now you’re here. Obviously you’re not a man who’ll do what people tell you to do, so I can only ask you to consider not to write about this topic again, keep it about journalistic practices, this is the subject, this is the topic. Journalism, as shown by MSM and similar blog sites, is down it’s way into a shithole at the moment, Escapist touched on this subject here http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/editorials/12223-The-Escapist-Publisher-Issues-Public-Statement-on-Gamergate and you may not know this or have yet to realize this but this is your chance for a turn with this panel, to figure out WHAT to do, how to improve the current situation not only in Games media but in all media.

Sarah Nyberg was never hacked btw, she made a comment somewhere that tied her SRHButts twitter to who she is.

I hope this made sense someway, and if I come of annoyed, pissed, yes I am, because I don’t want to get blamed, accused and left with responsibility for things out of my power, for things I did not do. I hope you will not invite SJW’s on your panel, why? SJW’s is something used to describe extremists, a lot of people confuse anti-gg with SJW’s, they are not the same. I have no problem with an anti-gg’er who knows we’re not a hate group, who knows what we are and what our movement is for, who has input about journalistic practices but disagrees with our strategies and overall methodology (emailing advertisers and stuff) please do invite them there, just make sure you are not inviting extremist idealouges(SJW’s) to your panel.

If any of this seems to come of as “don’t listen to the other side” it’s not, it’s don’t listen to trolls and extremists and stay on topics, you don’t suddenly start yelling about animal rights at a panel about global warming either, even though everyone is sympathetic towards animals and loves them.

Get fucked mod.
this is some hard evidence we have against that sick fuck Nyberg.
Just fuck that muh PR excuse, Nyberg is one of the main reasons why our PR is seen as crap, and it is well past time to return the favor to that sick fuck.

As Oliver Campbell recently said on twitter, “It is disingenuous to walk into a crowd of protesters and ask them to take responsibility for the random guy chucking firebombs”.

That being said, you’ll find some of GG is rather reluctant to decry the acts against aMIB or Nyberg. In many cases, this is because they don’t know about them (I didn’t know about either; aMIB uses the blockbot which I’m on, and Nyberg and I rarely interact), and in other cases, it’s because they are reluctant to see opponents as real individuals with real emotions.

Nyberg and aMIB are two individuals who are utterly convinced that GG is nothing more than a hate mob. If we are to give them a chance, they have to give us a chance as well.

On the topic of “the seedy side of gamergate”:

There are members of GG as invested in fighting as the two aforementioned individuals are. But it has largely become known that doxxing, harassment, and other forms of abuse are not tolerated, and if any individual tries such a thing, you can be sure that GG will do everything in their power to see that person punished.

GamerGate has been begging for a civil discussion about ethics for months, and my bet is that they won’t do anything to fuck it up.

“I replied…
Funny, that’s what people told me about your side a week ago. I always believe in trying to talk.”

AMiB is considered a troll based on what AMiB has done, a consequence of their own actions. “People told me about your side” equals entire “side” being held accountable for actions of some individuals hardly anyone can identify, individuals no one from GG has any authority to police.

Not to mention policing itself can potentially result in aggravating a genuine troll, now convinced whatever they’re doing is causing a desired effect. Still, GGHP at least tried, this act alone putting them miles ahead of “defenders of women in gaming” shedding their crocodile tears. Show me an equivalent of “heroes of AGG” being treated like Ralph or KoP by GG after making fools and/or assholes of themselves.

Ironically, you will find many more people like AMiB, so convinced they are “on the right side of history” that they are not even trying to hide their shitty behavior. As ugly anonymous trolls can be, they are at least fully aware that what they are doing is immoral (at best) or at least illegal (at worst). Self-awareness every Faracci-like fool screaming about ISIS under their own name, not to mention doxxers and garden variety abusers, is sorely missing. Probably because their own community, be it “gaming journalists”, “social justice advocates”, “radfems” or “culture critics” have failed to denounce them. Oh, who am I kidding, they were so eager to make asses of themselves publicly because they knew this sort of “no bad tactics, only bad targets” approach would result in praises, not denouncements.

So… sorry, but before GG is told for a 999th time to accept responsibility for some anonymous assholes, their critics should clean house from NON-anonymous ones, the ones carrying their “achievements” like goddamn medals, in just about every subgroup that gravitates towards Ghazi. Until that happens it looks like they are shaming people who decided to be civil for actions of people who decided against it. But it gets better. Since they know the latter group is actually dangerous (or “dangerous”, ie. “calls them bad words on Twitter”) they are settling for a target that they already know is “safe”.

It’s like a yapping york that acts as if you are a Devil Incarnate in-between pissing on your doors, but stays extreeeeemely clear of another building, because one of its inhabitants has a supply of stones, a good aim and zero fucks. But hey, york’s equivalents from AGG are humans, presumably with brains – so what’s their excuse?

“They say it’s about ethics in journalism, but it’s really just an excuse to harass women,” countless aGGros have said to interviewers, who often express incredulity yet don’t ask *us* what GG is about, and their stated reason is that we have no leader, no PR flak, and if Wikipedia says so, it must be true. They could ask around at KiA or read our wiki, but few do.

Ask yourself if it really makes sense that tens of thousands of people (35,000 at KiA alone) would sit around waiting for something like the zoepost for an excuse to harass women. If we’re so evil, who needs an excuse? Just look for any random women to harass. Does it make sense that men don’t want women players and devs? That the same guys who were being shamed for drawing or liking sexy female characters would draw the line at real women “invading” their space — meanwhile helping women enter the industry by funding an initiative that their side (Zoe in particular) tried to thwart?

Does that sound rational? Does it make sense that Gamergate includes so many women (including myself)?

We can just as easily say *they* were looking for an excuse to harass gamers. But nobody cares about gamers, and nobody prints what we say at any rate. The aGGros had friends and allies in the press. They controlled the narrative. All we can do is comment on inaccurate articles, and watch our comments get deleted.

Some people confronted other people. I stress, *people*, not just women, and the women were not harassed just for being women. Harassment is about prolonged communication; but if 100 people tweet at you, you’d feel harassed even though none of them feels they were harassing you. Most of us have no patience for juvenile name-calling or threats, but we can only control our own behavior. We’ve been told that all will be forgiven if we would only denounce harassment and doxing. Of course we do. But for some reason we’re never forgiven.

Everyone should read this. Even Randi Harper said last year GamerGate isn’t the cause of online harrassment on Twitter to newsweek. There is a stat in there that says only 12% of the harrassment on twitter was directly linked to GamerGate. While I am not going to fully listen and believe that this is 100% unbiased statistics. It does help to deconstruct we are a hate group and a majority of us hate women.

Essentially by writing this I am doxxing myself and calling myself out as a GG supporter using my real name. I don’t care, I was a Combat Medic in the Army. I was trained to defend myself, and I believe and support the only person an individual should trust with his or her personal safety is the individual themselves. They can come at me all they want, post my picture I do look creepy and the growing popularity of third wave feminism and ideals of it has effected me personally. So I cannot claim I am unbiased when critiquing feminist ideology. Attack me with no provocation for it, as I am anticipating anti’s to do just that because now everyone knows this real person supports GamerGate.

I support ethics in journalism and have been lurking and e-mailing advertisers during this thing. Recently I have been posting in twitter and being more visable.

Here’s the thing a big majority of GamerGate hasn’t been talking, but doing. E-mailing advertisers for so called journalistic sites like Gawker and Buzzfeed that primarily deal with clickbait/ragebait. Gawker and Buzzfeed last year had more ragebait than anything else. Most of the Games Journalism sites have been like this, which is one reason I stopped reading them a while ago.

GamerGate has been something that would have been inevitable without ZQ or even the gamers are dead articles. There have been decades of games journalists openly talking about recieving swag (different from recieving technology to review a game.) There have been rumors and speculations for years prior to last year about the Games Journalists industry. Even prior to the internet being affordable and more available in nearly every household in America. When it used to be just print positive reviews were usually given to devs that had full page ads in the magazine. While excellent games some being JRPG’s either didn’t get full coverage or got no coverage at all. The internet and growing popularity of video games among the population has put more light on these things.

Then there is the reactionary. The people that resemble our childhood bullies, the popular girls and boys that just did whatever popular girls wanted them to. Telling us that we are all the things we really hate. Saying things like we had the right idea in highschool we should bring back bullying nerds. While saying they are in a political special interest lobbying group where one lobby is anti-bullying. That because many of us were originally social outcasts we have no place in the discussion and we should just leave the hobby we have had, and have been bullied for having because of it. A lot of my salt comes from that. Comes from the blood sweat and tears I have shed because my hobby is playing and making video games and has been since middle school. My salt comes from almost an entire lifetime of being picked on and made fun of because I play video games. Then these people that resemble the same people that harassed and tormented me all throughout childhood is trying to do the same thing to others? I think that is part of where the reaction, salt, and anger really comes from. Those that feel excluded from society are more likely to be inclusive than those that feel include in society. Just my opinion.

I am not making a case for me to be elected as a leader of a leaderless movement of individuals. But asking for representatives as opposed to a moderated town hall type of forum I think is the same as demanding GamerGate have some kind of leadership. Again just my opinion. We are all individuals with individual thoughts. If you asked for moderators that were GG, I would say all the names listed before this would be good choices. But as representatives? That just seems to me like you are forcing a formless leaderless movement to choose leaders to speak for us all. If that is what it takes for our side to be taken seriously by the media so be it. But what purpose does that serve? I don’t think these people would see this as being given power in the movement, I trust them not to succumb to human nature and take advantage of perceived power. The possibility is still there.

As far as anti’s not feeling safe? Most will never feel safe. Brianna Wu, Zoe Quinn, or Anita Sarkeesian the most vocal against the movement would never agree to it. Because each of them has said disagreement and calling people’s errors out is harrassment. If they did show up they would probably immediately tweet how toxic and unsafe the environment feels. If anti’s join which I hope they do, they will try and keep those not actively participating out. Then use it to their advantage and call the representatives leaders.

I am excited for August 15th. I am moving out of Florida next month or sooner, but I will come to Miami just for this. Despite my reservations of asking for representatives.

Michael, I’m sorry to say that you’re going to have to wade through a lot of ad hominem, to get the deeper issues of this mess. It’s a shit job, but if you persevere, you’ll find that it does have, at its core, many and true ethical concerns which have, so far, not been given a chance to be heard. I’ve always thought that’s worth fighting for. I’ve been doing it for eight months.

As a GamerGater, I’ve personally seen harrasment and abuse being dished out by many actors in this endless saga, from either side, from third parties, from anyone and everyone. For the most part, GamerGate has condemned and disuaded these as best it can (and an understanding of what it can and cannot do as an intangible hashtag is important here). GG used to run a “harassment patrol” on Twitter, that reported en masse many trolls, harassers, and their ilk. But it has been eight months, eight months of butting our heads against brick walls.

We’re tired, Michael, we’re tired, and exasparated and jaded and fatigued. And you’re asking us to shine. Honestly, I don’t blame you, we should shine. This is the time for that, if any there was. We should be the very best of us.

I ask of you, plead with you, to fight as hard as you can for this debate, which I know you believe in. As a GGer who has only ever wanted this kind of event, this kind of discourse, this is a dream given form. I beg of you to judge us by our weakest link, but by our strongest.

This is not the same GG as it was eight, or even five months ago, but those of us who believe in the justice and honesty and the duty to truth of the journalism profession are still here.

I don’t know what my small voice can accomplish, in making us less jaded, and less prone-to-hostility, I do so very much hope we can rise above the hate.

To my fellow GamerGaters: This could be our finest hour, if we let anger and hate fade, brush the dirt off our clothes and be the good people I know we can be.

Both of those individuals have been mentally unstable, liars ,trolls and have been causing trouble and laughed at the internet long before GG.

I mean how many random users in the internet you know that have gotten their own pages of recorded trolling?

Yup this is how famous they are.

“Here’s a true test of GamerGate’s commitment: Tell A Man in Black you understand. Calmly and politely tell this man you despise: l’ll do my best to prove you wrong.”

We tried doing that for months,

“I believe 10,000 reasonable people whispering can drown out 100 trolls who are screaming. ”

We tried that for months, the only way we got anywhere was by constantly trying to contact people like you. if there are reasonable people in their side they are minority and are not willing to talk.

I am still waiting for someone to go on a stream and talk about things but it wont happen.

It will take 2 months but you will understand why we couldnt have solve this months ago, because they are unreasonable, the sole fact ghazi bans anyone from is pro gg but kotaku in action lets both sides talk should clue you in.

I’m not going to try and fight for a side but I will say this, both pro and anti made it a bigger issue when they added more to the mix than intended.

Loud pro-gg members started to come up with conspiracies. one good example of this is an article in the Journal of Broadcasting & Eletronic Meida titled “A Conspiracy Of Fishes, Or, How We Learned To Stop Worrying About #Gamergate And Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity” By Chess Shira, and Adrienne Shaw. Its about a certian youtuber who tires to tie Adrienne Shaw into a conspiracy on how feminism is trying to take over video games. Because of this and many other things many people who were already against feminism latched on to GamerGate confident that the feminists were the wasp’s nest they should attack. It didn’t help insane that trolls started to attack these people via doxxing. Is it true? Maybe, have they had enough of the shoddy journalism, disclosure failures and aggression towards their readership. Yeah.

Anti’s are mostly white knights and fems who aren’t in it to stop ethical journalism as most believe journalism is fine in gaming. Even more though believe that GG is 100% responsible for the trolls even though there are aggressors within there own ranks. (not naming anyone but there’s enough archive.today and tweetsave links to say the least).

All and all glad to see some civility for once. I’ll be in the trenches of twitter if anyone needs me.

Ok, just finished reading your article. The things myself and others take issue with on the “Pro” side are that:

1. The (many) genuinely good people among us are seemingly being made to accept responsibility for the actions of trolls and/or bad apples.

2. Butts and AMiB.

Regarding number 1, this is guilt by association.

Over the last nine months, I have met a lot of great people because of GG, many of which being on the “Pro” side. I won’t sit here and say that I get along with every single one of them, but I do get along with many of them, and they are good people.

Three people who are “Anti”, we talk/talked about other things(I speak with one more than the others) and generally get along(and that was after getting over the “Snark Wall” that anti people always seem to put up). Aside from that, I’ve had civil conversations with a few, but the rest, the vast majority of all conversations with them haven’t been good. They’re antagonistic for the entire conversation just because I support GG. They start off saying a variation of “Why do you support a hate group?”, which is ridiculous because GamerGate supporters are generally not hateful people. I stick with logic and remain civil, they move the goalpost and disregard anything that doesn’t fit their chosen narrative of “GamerGate is a hateful, misogynistic group that doesn’t want women in the industry”, which is ridiculous. Then the conversation usually devolves from there, which brings me to number 2….

Before I get started about srhbutts and amaninblack, I guess I have to say the usual spiel:

I do not support or condone harassment, doxxing, SWATing, etc. Online or offline. I have publicly condemned these actions many times and will always do so, regardless of who they happen to. No one “deserves” to have these things happen to them no matter what they pull. It might be “karma” but that doesn’t make it right.

A (not so) quick note about that spiel:

Part of antiGG’s approach is to put you on the defensive right off the bat. They often engage in…guilt by association. You are made to start off apologizing for things you don’t do or condone.

When you meet people face to face, do you have to tell them “I’m not a scumbag”? This is pretty much the same thing, and it’s tiring to have to deal with that nonsense not only online from people who repeatedly refuse to engage in meaningful discussion, but through mainstream media as well. We are repeatedly painted as what many of us are not, and it’s a real pain in the (rhymes with sass). I’m only scratching the surface, but I’ll stop there.

srhbutts and amaninblack are notorious trolls for the aGG side. Putting aside all the (mostly confirmed) vile personal stuff about srhbutts and staying strictly on topic, she constantly antagonizes our side, purposely taking people’s comments out of context with screenshots and spreading falsehoods. She’s well known for her constant ad hominems and generally hateful statements. To sum it up succinctly, she is not a good person, and has shown that many times over the last nine months. Despite this people on our side constantly talk to her and end up getting into petty nonsense because of it, which I personally get tired of seeing.

For nine months now we’ve been painted as disgusting and vile people of the worst kind when they’ve got people who genuinely fit that mold on the other side.

amaninblack is pretty much just the same as srhbutts. I tried speaking with him, it was the same as it was with most other antis. For others it has apparently been much more vile, but I can’t give specifics. Just ask around and people will be able to.

I just blocked him, and also blocked srhbutts. Honestly, I wish more would do the same, but at the same time I do understand the necessity of keeping tabs on her actions because she constantly lies and stirs the pot. Even though the vast majority of aGG will look at the evidence right in front of them and disregard it, there’s that minority who won’t. As much as I run into walls reaching out, I usually seem to find myself trying again.

Ok, I think that’s it. If I meant to talk about something else and forgot, that’s on me lol. I am not scrolling all the way back up, but I thank you for scrolling down and reading this :).

If the SPJ openly states that the actions of Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun, Destructoid, Polygon, etc. are ethical breaches there are three people at those outlets that will care; the only three people that have ever gone to journalism school. And that professional scolding from a non-regulatory body just means that the three are stuck with games journalism for the rest of their life, so they may as well double down on their inflammatory rhetoric.

The rest of the mewling idiots at these websites don’t give a tinker’s damn what a bunch of print media geezers think of them. YOU ARE NOT THEIR COLLEAGUES. The only opinion they care about is the masses of pink haired, over privileged white kids with trust funds that lavish them with praise and patreon money for lip-service to progressive ideals. Those professional umbrage takers just looking for their two minutes of hate.

Gaming is larger than the film or music industry. Market forces will decide this battle. My wallet has stayed shut, and I see no reason to change this practice. I have a backlog of hundreds of unplayed titles, and far more money than time to enjoy them. My money can instead be spent on fine scotch.

“I believe 10,000 reasonable people whispering can drown out 100 trolls who are screaming.” I mean this in the nicest way possible, that is stupid. A group is judged by the actions that are “perpetrated” in its name. In GG their are two sides, PGG and AGG. On a side note which side do you think has the overwhelming influence in regard to media? The main stream media’s goal is to make any given topic appear to affect as many people as possible. Apparently you don’t understand the situation. Most trolls are just harmless idiots that call you X Y and Z to evoke a certain response. However their is a subset that is technologically literate which gives them far more power to evoke a certain response. They both have the same reason for doing such, they may have different rationalizations for why but their main reason remains a constant. They want to exercise power/control over something or someone. AGG claims GG is a harassment campaign that focuses on women in the game industry, all the troll has to do is harass women within the industry and AGG has “proof”. Shit for a troll that is easy pickings, finding someone who isn’t aware you are looking for them. There are thousands of legal person searching sites that even I could use. These legal sites host information on about 200 some million people in the United States alone. Things such as email, home phone, address, family information are easily and legally accessible. That goes without saying the illegal onion sites that offer similar but far more comprehensive information on citizens. Just give them the person’s name and for X amount you can have copies of their soc., tax records, billing statements, etc. For anyone who thinks I’m overstating their potential to fuck with people’s lives look no further then groups like LulSec and Lizard Squad. If they can fuck with companies like Sony, PayPal, and Microsoft why is it so hard to believe they can fuck with a single person or group. No why would such degenerates fuck with a group like GG, it’s not worth their time? Because they can and GG is an easy target to fuck with, no dialogue is taking place. It reminds me of the scene in Trainspotting when Renton shoots the dog laying by his owner with a BB gun and the dog attacks his owner. AGG believes PGG are harassers, so to stop them from believing that, PGG is going to harass them? What do we gain, seriously what is to be gained by silencing a few AGG people? When people bring up the harassment perpetrated by AGG people most of them aren’t using that to justify the harassment they received, they are pointing out their hypocrisy. I’m against harassment unless… it’s against people I don’t like or agree with. What a lot of people in their responses here have said is spot on when it comes to their views on harassment. GG is a harassment campaign if harassment is disagreeing with the other person. If all GG are harassers, why haven’t arrests been made? So everyone in GG has the cunning to avoid being caught by the FBI. Who wants dialogue, why the fuck would we want to talk about the issues if our goal was to harass woman out of the industry? “I had a private email exchange yesterday — part of which he publicly posted, so I’m not violating any confidences — where we debated what percentage of GamerGate is hateful. He maintains it’s 100%…” I may have come to dislike certain people throughout this ordeal but it’s because people like him. “To GamerGaters, A Man in Black is a troll himself. But I understand him. He has a friend who spoke out against GamerGate and suffered mightily for it. When you get shot for dissenting, it doesn’t matter if an instigator or true believer pulled the trigger. You flinch the next time someone raises the topic.” That heavily implies that such a response is rational. My parents died in a car accident to this very day I can’t see a car without attacking it. You don’t blame a group for the acts of an individual or a handful of individuals. Okay for a real example from my own life; My uncle Jimmy was shot and killed while driving home. He happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when two people who happened to be black got in a shootout and caught 2 .357 rounds in his belly. This was back in the early 2000s, he didn’t have a cell so he kept driving. He went about five miles and crashed into the side of the fire departments building. They rushed him to the hospital but he died on the operating table. I don’t hate black people, I hate the person who killed him. I really appreciate what you’re doing but if a troll decides to do something it won’t matter we’ll get blamed for it. I wish this could work but AirPlay is setup to fail from what I read. We have already been dragged through the mud by every media outlet, we will always be here, we are the majority, the journalist in our industry overvalued themselves they forgot who got them to where they are now. I would love if that mud was washed off but it doesn’t matter we have already won. They changed their policies, they have and or will realize that games journalism should be about games not ideologies. I will not apologize, such guilt by omission implies that I haven’t roundly deposed such acts. I realize how aggressive this comes across and as much as I hate the word entitled but I have sat by throughout this whole debacle seeing people who don’t enjoy games pretend to care about their future. Disingenuous critics are one thing but when journalists I respect jump in support of other journalists from different publications absolving them from all guilt I can no longer ignore the nepotism and cronyism within the industry. I would like to wrap this up by adding that of course some idiots in GG could have been responsible but that’s not the courtesy we were given. Our guilt was presumed without question. Haha just look at the reaction you got from your peers, who is the one being silenced, us or them, your peers wouldn’t even consider us. Thank you and have a great day!

I’ve been watching Gamergate as a neutral gamer since this all started. Early on I gathered information and, more recently, I’m excited for the SPJ event.

What happened to Sarah Nyberg is unacceptable, regardless of why it was done. I believe Mr. Koretzky put this perfectly well in the above statement, so there is little need to elaborate.

Whether members of Gamergate, individually or collectively, are responsible for this or not, it should go without saying that this behavior cannot be condoned. From what I’ve seen, Gamergate can and often will decry this type of behavior. Even so, I think it should be said as often as is necessary “Gamergate does not suffer from showing sympathy or compassion. Gamergate does suffer from being amused by or showing indifference to the unjust suffering of its enemies, since it will likely take the fall for said suffering.”

I don’t mean to argue that Gamergate needs to hold Sarah’s hand, and certainly not that it must take responsibility for what has happened. I do argue that, when someone exhibits this behavior using the hashtag, members of Gamergate should discourage it in the interests of both the victim and of themselves.

Thank you, Mr. Koretzky, for addressing this issue and the issues regarding Gamergate as a whole. Your involvement has made it more possible for neutral parties like myself to feel safe getting involved.

I accidentally hit post comment before I corrected my stupid grammar mistakes. Such as using the right version of there or their, God I hate looking like an idiot and for those who catch them, I know… Why Can’t I edit my post jeez lol oh well 😔😔😔

” Convince my fellow journalists and your wounded opponents that they have nothing to fear by attending AirPlay.”

I have multiple problems with this statement

1: Gamergate is the accused in this situation. Shouldn’t you be asking the accusers for proof that Gamergate is dangerous? Is GG guilty until proven innocent?

2: Do your fellow journalists also believe that people like Oliver Campbell and William Usher are individuals to fear? They are journalists like you and I can’t remember a time when these people were threatening to anyone.

If your fellow journalists have a problem discussing Gamergate with other journalists because of guilt by association then it seems like GG isn’t the problem, they are.

3: “Or call me an asshole and watch AirPlay burn to the ground. If that happens,”
Some may be calling you an asshole but I’m not and many others are not. The people that support GG are treating this seriously. Hell why do you think they flooded the SPJ hashtag with ethics tweets? You can’t tell me they were doing to just to be idiots. It was for a reason and it was to get the SPJ’s attention.

The only people looking to make AirPlay burn to the ground are the people not willing to come to the table and discuss issues. The same people that feel comfortable calling GG a hate group and not bother with investigating all the facts. GG has always been willing to come to the table from the very beginning. GG has had to fight for “fair coverage” in the media. GG has had to fight for the chance to have interviews and debates. The opponents of GG? They get airtime for free.

4: “Dave Rickey didn’t want me to write this post at all, fearing it’s a troll magnet…”
This is to Dave Rickey and your fellow journalists: Stop treating the people that want to talk to you like monsters and start treating them like human beings.
There are gamers, journalists, developers, professors, actors that want your attention and your response is to treat them like “trolls” and “people to fear”? It’s talk like this that makes me think the SPJ is not a “Society of Professional Journalists”.

The main issue I see that keeps getting brought up is that “Gamergate is something to fear and to be avoided” from your journalists and from the media. It seems like your fellow journalists have already made up their mind about Gamergate and are not really willing to listen to GG’s side.

So, your journalists want to listen to the media yet they don’t want to get any statements from Gamergate?

It seems like your journalists are not being objective here. How in the world is Gamergate supposed to convince your fellow journalists that they have nothing to fear from GG when they are displaying a clear bias against Gamergate? Do they really want to listen to Gamergate or is it a bunch of hot air?

Just so you know, there are many people who still point out harassment to have it reported even if there is no “harassment patrol” anymore. Even before there was a “harassment patrol” there were people such as myself who would try to get everyone to report an account when we saw it harassing someone. The patrol stopped mostly because no matter what we did to stop harassment on Twitter, which is a bit like trying to plug a leaking dam with your fingers, our efforts were not recognized and the media continued to vilify us as evil harassers dedicated to destroying the lives of women.

One blogger insinuated GamerGate framed one person who was making death threats against Anita after many of us identified him and when that person replied to his tweet about that blog post using an impersonation account of Anita he actually used the hashtag to ask us to report the account like he hadn’t just accused us of making it all up. We reported the harasser anyway and he got suspended all the same. Despite that, the blogger has continued pushing that same narrative about us being dedicated to harassment. Yet, at the same time, we get harassed or threatened for supporting GamerGate and even moreso for trying to deal with the people harassing those vilifying us.

When the baphomet board began SWATting and doxing people, Butts tried to appeal to GamerGate. Most of us had no interest in getting in the way of a group willing to send SWAT teams after us on false reports for people such as Butts who would barely acknowledge our help before and continued to vilify and defame us in spite of it. I still try to call out and report harassment when I see it as do many others, but the will for it is not as strong as it was in the beginning. Not many of us want to be in a situation where we do good deeds for people only to have them beat on us and call us garbage.

On Butts specifically, I would say the one thing that sticks with me is something that happened more recently. After Law and Order: SVU put out this rather comically absurd episode based on GamerGate, a major developer, Mark Kern, came out to ask the media to try and repair the damage that had been caused. He noted that they contributed substantially to the narrative that became the SVU episode and expressed concern about the implications of a new moral panic for the industry. After Kern started a petition addressed to Kotaku and Polygon to try and get them to help repair the damage, One gaming outlet VG247, responded with a piece accusing Kern of shooting the messenger and also attacking another dev who had spoken out on the situation. The piece ended with this line about the petition, “Think before you sign. It may be very difficult to erase the ink.”

Kern was upset with the overall tone of the piece and asked for it to be edited to better reflect his views and intentions or, failing that, allowing him a right of reply to the piece in his own piece for their outlet. They refused and no other gaming outlet was willing to let him do a published piece for their site. So people responded with a hashtag encouraging the games media to “Let Mark Speak” and then Butts responded with the extremely disingenuous “Let Women Speak” hashtag. Yet, many in GG decided to use it to encourage letting women speak, including women who support GamerGate. There were many female supporters of GG who posted in the tag along side men who encouraged people to let all women speak.

Like many hashtags in this case, there were some people posting garbage in it. There were, as I recall, three pornographic images posted in the tag spread out over the course of six or so hours. After the last of those images was posted many hours after the previous one, Butts lied and claimed GamerGate was responding to a tag to “Let Women Speak” by “flooding” it with porn. Unfortunately, several trolls saw that remark and themselves responded by trying to flood the tag with porn (mostly in direct replies to that tweet) making Sarah’s lie appear like the truth and convincing those who might have otherwise recognized that it was a lie. For Me, Sarah is a very dishonest and manipulative individual and I understand why people would detest such a person. I, for one, try not to detest anyone, but please realize that people are not simply upset at someone for being critical of us, but for lying and defaming us not matter what good deeds we perform.

I, like many others, do not support the kind of things being directed at Butts, but if you expect anyone to apologize to this person then you are expecting a bit more than I would expect of someone in a similar situation.

If you go to 8chan, Nyberg has been determined to be fair game. This isn’t about GG, this is personal. That hypocrite has spread heinous lies, cried about it when she recieved the smallest of pushbacks from the ayyteam and made sure she blamed GG instead of the real culprits.

She sexually molested her cousin and a dog. GG doesn’t condone harassing, but every speck of dirt we will find and make public, if you want to call that harassing, so be it. We can’t control what troll groups do with the information or pictures we dig up. Nyberg deserves every single minute of this.

Sarah “Butts” Nyberg is a known troll and harasser who loves to take commentary out of context and spin it as “proof that GooberGrape is all about harassment!” (And yes, I have seen her unironically use that sort of grade-school mockery.)

I have no idea what drew her into the whole GamerGate mess, and I wish she’d just go away. (As, I suspect, do the vast majority of GamerGate’s supporters, simply because they’re sick and tired of her disingenuous, inflammatory, and borderline harassing conduct.)

A Man in Black is also a known troll. He’s also suspected of being the same A Man in Black who was desysopped on Wikipedia for flagrant and unrepentant abuse of administrative powers.

If we assume that Twitter’s AMiB is the same one from Wikipedia, then I would suggest that his interest in GamerGate stems solely from a desire to perpetuate the narrative of harassment and bigotry that has so long distracted from the matters with which GamerGate’s supporters are truly concerned (namely, a shocking and unapologetic lack of ethical conduct within the video-game industry, with a particular focus on the outlets whose responsibility it is to provide fair and unbiased coverage of said industry and its products).

If you need an example of just how damaging this narrative has been, you need only look at the Wikipedia entry for “GamerGate Controversy”; it parrots the established narrative simply because “reliable sources” such as the BBC and the New York Times have merely repeated the claims of less-reputable outlets without bothering to do any proper journalistic legwork.

In point of fact, there was an infographic circulating a while back that provided an excellent executive summary of how the narrative was formed; to wit:

Kotaku: “GamerGate is a misogynistic hate group!”
Gawker: “GamerGate is a misogynistic hate group! Kotaku said so!”
Polygon: “GamerGate is a misogynistic hate group! Kotaku and Gawker said so!”
The BBC: “GamerGate is a misogynistic hate group! Kotaku, Gawker, and Polygon said so!”

Wikipedia: “…Look at all these people saying GamerGate is a misogynistic hate group. IT MUST BE TRUE.”

Of course, had any of the “reliable sources” done even the barest modicum of research, they likely would have discovered that the vast majority of the outlets who initially made the claim that “GamerGate is a misogynistic hate group!” were the very same ones that GamerGate supporters had criticized for perceived ethical breaches.

Now, with that out of the way: if these two people have been on the receiving end of harassment, threats, and doxing attempts, then count mine amongst the voices who say they don’t deserve that kind of treatment.

True, they are – to borrow a turn of phrase – “a pair of major douchefields who handle several hundred douchecraft takeoffs and landings an hour”… but douchiness doesn’t deserve doxing. Not even if said douchiness on their part manifests as doxing, threats, and harassment directed against those they dislike and/or disagree with.

(As for why I say “if they’ve received such treatment”? Well, that’s mainly because – based on their conduct – I reeeeeeeally don’t trust them; in point of fact, my lack of trust in their words is so great that I’d stick my hand under a running faucet if they told me water was wet!)

Gamergate explicitly condones harassment in order to silence their critics: https://storify.com/adulus/gamergate-doxxed-srhbutts. Chris Kluwe had his home address posted in the chat while he debated Cernovich. Randi Harper was recently swatted and had members of Gamergate showing up to her workplace because she wrote a program that blocks them on twitter.

This is what every anti-GG person will have to deal with if they show up to this farce. You haven’t seen what they do to people who aren’t useful to them.

i just want to add that doxxing is a joke. most “doxxing” comes from typing in someone’s name into google, or using a free service to connect their usernames. If you are afraid of doxxing, i can’t imagine the horror when you recieve that giant book of white pages on your doorstep every year or so.

I’ve supported GamerGate from the start, and have always condemned doxxing and harassment, so I’m happy to do so again.

I do wish that people on the anti side would be more willing to do the same, with GamerGate supporters like Liz Finnegan who backed out of the discussion after being doxxed and having her children threatened.

I think some GamerGate people bristle when asked to condemn harassment because it’s so rarely asked of the other side, and seems to imply that GamerGate is somehow uniquely responsible for trolls on the internet in a way that other groups aren’t.

However, my view is that means we just need to go the extra mile in showing that doxxing, hacking, and anything similar are in no way supported by GamerGate, are absolutely condemned by us, and serve no purpose other than to frustrate the discussion we’ve been trying to have for almost a year.

Pardon if I’m uninformed, but I have no stake in whatever goes on regarding these two figures. I’ve largely ignored Nyberg and MiB, primarily because they’re side figures in an ongoing debate on the validity of game journalists.

I recognize outside sources of harassment exist on both sides, and when it reaches outside the confines of the law such things can be reported and resolved, but I’m unfamiliar with how this matter is related. Even regarding backgrounds, it should hold little standing with the person’s validity of their comments and arguments on both sides. Attacks on a person solve nothing and change nothing from either side, be it some “entitled hypersensitive manchild”, or “alleged pedophile”. Attack rhetoric, never the person. That said, my dismissing their comments isn’t because of their standing as “trolls”, I just find most of what they say to be untrue or framed in a manner that misrepresents quotes.

If you don’t mind, could you include a pool of game journalists to discuss things like active collusion without disclosure, blacklisting of indie developers that have opposing political opinions, and GameJournosPro in general? Thank you so much, I do appreciate you’re attempting to have this dialog, and this is the primary reason I’ve become involved in this. Especially how developers were suffering because corrupt journalists were giving too much positive coverage of their friends, and these indie devs couldn’t speak out against the practice in fear of never getting a job or coverage again.

I agree mostly, this issue is too divisive and it’s straight-up impossible to talk about it in most cases. That’s probably the biggest reason why I want AirPlay to happen. I don’t have much time for ‘online movements’ and such, but I’ve talked to enough gamergaters to be sure that I want them to be heard.

One of the reasons I sort of took a step back from the GG discussion last year was exactly the kind of stuff you’re talking about. While most of the bad behavior such as doxes, threats, likely comes from people that are more pro-‘watching the world burn’ than pro-gamergate, I do think that many gamergaters have fallen into such hostile opposition towards the ‘other side’ that they are willing to resort to the most deplorable of extremist tactics (eg. digging up character assassination material on Nyberg, or on Ben Kuchera, as well as that one time that they tried to get Leigh Alexander condemned as racist by CNN… and on very sketchy grounds).

But this hostility is a human problem. I hope AirPlay helps solve it; discussion among people with different beliefs tend to reduce extremist tendencies. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to sort of tone down the just sheer amount of hostility there is here (on both sides), and the only possible solution I have been able to think of is something like AirPlay.

As for how it even came to this in the first place? Well, there are some parts of history where just everything went perfectly right. Like how the US and the USSR didn’t nuke each other, how my country somehow survived WW2, or the proof of the fundamental theorem of calculus. Well Gamergate is the exact opposite: A situation in history where everything went as wrong as possible.

The beginnings were extremely ugly, kicking off with a bitter flame war. Many of the articles about the beginnings were of low quality, and some even written by close friends of… one of the people involved. And in some cases they left the fact that they were friends undisclosed to the readers, sometimes this was the fault of the writer, sometimes the editor. Lots of people started asking some… uncomfortable questions, and the flaming got worse. Also, many (probably) well-meaning forum moderators completely banned discussion of the issues in this. And at the same time there were the people who had been saying that games journalism is rotten for years, just waiting for a chance to step up and start putting some pressure on the journalists.

Did you hear about the ‘Gamers are dead’ articles? Half a dozen gaming and tech publications put out inflammatory articles with mostly faulty premises and plenty of wishful thinking, all to condemn the people that are now gamergaters. It’s almost like the media straight up barged in and joined the flame war, I guess. Hindsight is hindsight, but in retrospect things would have been much better if some of those articles had not been written.

There were a few times where this could have been solved already.

One was mid-September. Totalbiscuit had gotten some journalists to agree to discuss the issues with him, to alleviate the concerns of the community and get a discussion going. They all pulled out of these talks after the GameJournoPros list was revealed.

Another was early October. Erik Kain and Totalbiscuit had again started getting discussion going, and it felt like things were calming down a bit. There was a pretty decent discussion hosted by Kain, with a few people from Defy Media as well as Totalbiscuit. There was much hope for further debate; Kain said he’d do a mini-series out of similar Gamergate-related discussion. This was all crushed when suddenly a few anti-gamergaters got mainstream media screentime and sometimes lied, sometimes misrepresented, and generally just whipped up so much hostility towards Gamergate that I thought things would never calmed down. I’ve never seen as much concentrated hatred in such short time as back when MSNBC did their first (very inaccurate) Gamergate story.

I really, really, really hope AirPlay doesn’t turn into a third such event.

So, I debated for a while whether I should launch personal attacks on AMIB and Sarah Nyberg and I decided against it. Keep talking to them, you’ll eventually reach the same conclusion as me: they’re propagandists.

Instead, I’ll just tell you why I’m no longer in the GG Harassment Patrol. Keep in mind this behavior I will be describing from aGG includes both AMIB and Sarah Nyberg.

I never condoned harassment, doxing, etc… but if I’m brutally honest though, I’ll say I don’t care if they get harassed anymore. Not my problem. Now, I’m sure you’re wondering, why would he feel that way?

Kinda goes back to months ago when harassment was becoming a common problem and doxes were popping up nearly every 2-3 days and twitter wasn’t doing much about it. A bunch of us in GG decided to start helping crack down on the threats. It’s called the GamerGate Harassment Patrol and afaik, it’s no longer active because 1, harassment is much less common and 2-we got sick of aGG pissing on our efforts to help.

The point was, we’ll tackle the stuff that breaks the Twitter Terms of Services, like death threats, doxes and the outrageously offensive stuff like I don’t know, a burner account saying nigger this, nigger that or tweeting disgusting pics at targets.

And that’s what we did. I thought it was cool. We were helping people, we really were and not just the ones in GG. But then we’d get blamed for it anyway. We organized to report a harasser of Brianna Wu, got it suspended and hours after we managed that, she tweets about it saying ‘Oh look, GamerGate is harassing me again! They have be stopped!’

And that wasn’t just her. People against GamerGate used every opportunity to try to turn us into their personal army. Like, someone would insult them, say something mean and suddenly, they’d call on us asking to report someone for being rude. And because we refused to do that, because we were a group to tackle threats and serious harassment, we’d get pissed on saying we’re actually harassers or that we don’t care and even though we reported these things, we’d be blamed for it.

Did antis participate or even HELP in it? Only in a few occasions and this was when doxes of the Kotaku journalists were released by the Billy Waggoner crew. You think they gave a crap when it was a critic of Sarkeesian being doxed like Sargon of Akkad? Or when the writers of TechRaptor (which is a site we support) or nichegamer got doxed? Nope, not a goddamn peep.

Or when Liz had a troll send her a printed pic of her with semen on it, there we had, our dear anti-GG crusaders constantly whining about harassment and how they wanted it to end blaming her because she didn’t denounce hard enough the fact that the anti-GG guy ordering nasty things to be done to her (in the picture) was likely to be fake. Yeah, you had a pic with semen sent to you and because you don’t know if the guy is involved, if the tweet is fake or not, you don’t take a stance because you don’t know. So there they were, chastising a woman who just got sent a stomach-turning picture because she wasn’t denouncing it wasn’t anti-GG behind it hard enough. It’s not like she even blamed them. She didn’t. But did they give a crap about her being harassed? Nope.

But even then, I wasn’t doing it for thanks, so I continued. But i’m afraid the ungrateful fucks constantly insulting the gamergate harassment patrol really got to me over time. After the holidays, I realized I was done patrolling to protect them. If they want to try false reporting 8chan for child porn to try having it taken down and thus getting the attention and the nasty boards of 8chan such as /baphomet? Don’t care. We warned them about it, we warned them they weren’t gonna play nice, that they weren’t like GG and yet they still did it anyway. It’s akin to a guy who decides to stick his dick in a beehive and then starts crying about being stung.

So this why I no longer care about any harassment happening to aGG. They made me stop caring through their callous attitude. Because they don’t care about harassment, they care about harassment happening to THEM. The one done to us? We deserve it for being such monsters. I reached out, as did many of us and they pissed on us for trying to help.

Now I know this doesn’t describe all of anti-GG, it really doesn’t because I speak with a few more reasonable and polite voices against GamerGate and it’s nice. I like being able to engage people with different opinions like adults without being called a child porn apologist, a terrorist or any such things. But I would have expected not to have insults thrown at us when trying to report harassment.

Seedy parts… The complexity of the situation is something else, and media may be forgiven for making mistakes. I will however not forgive them for eagerly spreading false narratives; for not even TRYING to research the issue seriously. I’m liberal-progressive, but online leftism is in a very sorry state right now. An awful lot of people, in and out of media organizations, appear to BELIEVE much harder than they think – the ongoing culture war thus comes with an awful lot of misguided activism (and people taking advantage, trying to profit off of the true believers and/or make a name for themselves). Not to mention all the peculiar social signaling/posturing taking place, on and off Twitter.

As for supposed “gators” making noise of the unacceptable kind… it’s a gross simplification but let’s go with two main categories of people:
(1) Those with no stake in GamerGate, drawn to the drama.
(2) Those with a stake in GamerGate, but with little if any interest in legitimacy.

Those in (1) haven’t truly picked a side, but might feign interest and go after individuals on either (or both) side(s). Most will be anonymous, but since being outrageous enough can get you in the spotlight of big news corporations, some of the noise gets very public.

Those in (2) care about gaming, but may be willing to go further than “mainstream” GamerGate does. Some of them even appropriate feminist concepts like “tone policing” to attack the fellow GGers criticizing them for being too radical. They might be disillusioned, not believing games journalism can be saved – or possibly even PREFERRING that the whole “journalistic” part of the gaming industry burns to the ground (after all, gamers need game developers, but can do without pompous unethical writers telling them what they are allowed to like).

Sorry to contribute to your information overload, but constantly countering the narrative of trolls and ideologues requires information if you haven’t watched GamerGate for months. I regret this derails from the more important conversation at hand, but I’m tired of ideologues and trolls attempting to project a narrative (and no, they won’t go away if ignored).

Reconciliation has been attempted multiple times with Nyberg. One example:

Sarah Nyberg (@srhbutts):
Mar 12 2015
@TechyFolks: “Talking to @srhbutts, she’s getting some nasty RL stuff done to her. I really hope none of us are involved in that shit. #GamerGate…Butts isn’t doing anything to anyone in real life, her right to free speech is as important as anyones.”https://twitter.com/TechyFolks/status/576146836060254208
Cal ‏@whtsmn Mar 12 “I think she’s an awful person, but any sort of harassment is unacceptable.”
Cookie McGooo ‏@Cooki3McGee Mar 12 “…Whether I like her or not, she certainly doesn’t deserve it. I’m sorry its happening!”
Dan @_DHMapplethorpe Mar 12 “What’s happening?
Any way we can help? Would it help if she went to the police?”
Capt_Hat ‏@CaptHat211 Mar 12 “If anyone from #GamerGate is involved let us know so we can report them.”
Video Culture Replay ‏@VCR_Blog Mar 12 “No one deserves to be harassed”
Lord Dweedle ‏@LordDweedle Mar 12 “wait so, people are doxing this butts person? ffs.. Sorry you have had to go through that shit. No one deserves that”
Teirusu Reynard ‏@Tails_155 Mar 12 “I don’t know what’s going on, either, but abuse is not okay… I don’t care how hate filled she is. I am not going to change my “no abuse” stance for individuals
Leader of GG #10539 ‏@PhoenixCE Mar 12 “I don’t want anything bad to happen. She needs to go to the police.”

Nyberg, is in fact, a troll who effectively has gained status by serving as the Goebbels of anti-GamerGate. She is part of a small group of Twitter accounts (including @untimelygamer, @SuperSpacedad, @Quinnae_Moon, @ashleylynch
@arthur_affect, etc) that thrive on distortions and mischaracterizations rather than dialog.

“Mike, your problem isn’t that you’re an asshole (you may be, I leave that discussion for you and your spouse to resolve). Your problem is that you, like a lot of smart professionals, are arrogant enough to believe that you’re the first person to take an objective look at this issue and see some kernel of truth. You aren’t.”

-I don’t agree. I don’t think he’s arrogant enough to think he’s the first person; I think he is the first person in the SPJ to take it seriously enough to examine it and not make an assumption without research.

Seems to be evidenced by the facts based on the SPJ response, to me.

“There’s no stone unturned here. Debates have been had, endlessly. Your entire premise — that there is a serious discussion left to be had within the confines of the #gamergate issue about journalistic ethics — is fundamentally flawed.”

-No, it hasn’t. Those opposing Gamergate have never made any effort to debate; just attack and derail. The head of the IDGA admits there’s been no communication (while neglecting she’s the one blocking said communication, not the other way around).

“Why? Because the majority, if not the overwhelming majority, of GGers have not even put the time or effort in to honestly come up with a workable definition of what “ethics” means. Consider this: most of them actually wholeheartedly agree with the statement that “being a ‘social justice warrior’ is unethical.” Despite the oft-repeated claims of them being “anti-censorship” and “pro-artistic freedom,” their core unifying aim is to “beat” feminist and leftist cultural critics out of gaming and gaming discussions, because they feel that the very act of voicing such critiques is an assault on their culture, and a libel on them personally.”

-wormsby needs to address why the SPJ code of ethics isn’t a workable definition, then, because that’s the standard we’ve been using for 8+ months.

“”So while I agree they very genuinely believe themselves to be a movement about professional ethics, the problem is they simply have a completely unworkable and in fact deeply suspect definition of what professional ethics are.”

“Consider that a top candidate for their contingent is Bokhari’s colleague and friend Milo Yiannopoulos. If any significant number of GGers felt that simple bias in journalism was “unethical,” then Yiannopoulos — a scathing, unabashedly partisan cultural critic of the left – would be a great poster child for unethical journalism. If they felt dishonesty or playing loose with the facts was unethical, then again, Yiannopoulos, who’s blamed a bomb threat on “feminists” and jumped the gun badly on blaming a recent kerfuffle with Joss Whedon on feminism as well, would have to be thrown in the unethical pile. If they really believed “harassment” and personal attacks were unethical, they’d have to concede that Yiannopoulos’s vituperative articles on Shanley Kane and tweets calling Nyberg a “vile tranny” were unethical. Hell, Yiannopoulos has unequivocally stated his own belief that GG is not primarily about ethics at all.”

-He’s a top candidate because he’s good at debate. I actually don’t think he’s a good candidate, because much of what he does is muckraking. He regularly ignores the harm his stories might do.

Let’s go over that code.
1) Take responsibility for the accuracy of the work. Milo appears to do this. I do not know of accusations that his facts are wrong. I could stand to be corrected.
2) Remember that neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy. Milo appears fine; again, I don’t know of any accusations of inaccuracy.
3) Provide Context. Take care not to misrepresent … Milo may not be fine here. I’m often suspicious of the presentation of his information. Then again, he is editorializing, not simply reporting. That’s commonly been used as the excuse on other sites for why they ignore context and frame a story to push a position.
4) Gather, update, and correct information throughout the life of a story. Milo appears to do this. I can neither confirm or deny specifically.
5) Be cautious when making promises, but keep promises made. As far as I know, Milo does this.
6) Identify sources clearly. Milo doesn’t always do this. Neither do most journalists, unfortunately. For example, when William Usher broke the Game Journo Pro list info, Milo didn’t publish his name in order to protect his source. I think that’s excusable in instances of whistle-blowers and the like, which I feel this qualifies.
7) Consider sources anonymity. Milo appears to do this.
8) Diligently seek subjects to allow them to respond. Milo does this. I’ve seen him do it repeatedly, and well in advance to allow a response. It’s gotten him doxxed, for what it’s worth.
9) Avoid unnecessary undercover methods. I believe Milo does this; I have no reason to think otherwise at this time.
10) Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable. From my perspective, Milo does this. You might disagree based on your ideology.
11) Support open and civil exchange of views, even repugnant views. I’m not sure this is true for Milo, but it seems to be. There’s a political bent to Milo’s work that suggests otherwise.
12) Recognize a special obligation to be a watchdog of the government. Frankly, I think Milo does, for his government. You might disagree.
13) Provide access to source material when relevant. Milo does this in his stories.
14) Boldly tell diverse stories from unheard voices. Gamergate qualifies IMO, so Milo fits. He was the only one willing to talk to us at first, really.
15) Avoid stereotyping. I don’t think Milo fits here. His writing seems full of assumptions about others.
16) Label advocacy and commentary. Again, not sure he does this, but he does it better than most. I don’t think you’re really unaware what he’s advocating when you read his work.
17) Never deliberately distort facts or context. I don’t think Milo qualifies here either. I’ve read stuff by him I felt misused context.
18) Never plagiarize. As far as I know, Milo hasn’t done this.

Overall, I’d say Milo seeks truth and reports it.

I won’t go point by point; Milo doesn’t seek to minimize harm. I’d argue with anyone who says he does. His stuff has a lot of direct attack pieces in it.

Act Independently: Milo seems to be independent of financial and personal interests, but I do think the Gamergate controversy has been good for him the way any good story is good for someone writing about it early. I think he maintains just enough distance to not be considered a Gamergate supporter, but he definitely supports and writes to support a particular ideology; I would not say Milo is independent of that, but I would say he’s very up-front about it.

Be accountable and transparent: I’m not sure, but I’d say overall, he is. His responses aren’t always civil, but they’re usually of like to the response he gets, and he definitely writes about other journalistic corruption.

In the end, I think Milo isn’t perfectly ethical, but he’s a damn sight better than almost anyone writing in game journalism, anyone writing against gamergate has been, and most of mainstream media at this point. He CHECKS HIS FACTS, which is more than I can say for most.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to demand perfection at this point.

“Don’t get me wrong. I think Yiannopoulos is a jerk, but I am not ready to accuse him of being in violation of the ethical code governing his profession. He’s entitled to speech. Speech works like that.”

-Ethical code in journalism is more a list of guidelines, not legalities. That may very depending on jurisdiction.

“But really, don’t let arrogance blind you to this glaring red flag. Yiannopoulos would not seriously be put forth as a standard bearer by people who genuinely favor unbiased, non-smearing, “ethical” journalism. Something’s fundamentally wrong with this picture.”

-That’s your opinion and you’re entitled to it. I think there are better examples of ethical journalists available, but I think Milo comes out as reasonably ethical considering he’s mostly a pundit.

“That said, I do not agree with some opponents of GG that GG is primarily a “hate mob.” Indeed, that response is unproductive. I don’t think most of GG are even necessarily acting in bad faith. To the contrary, I think they are genuine in their belief that there is a problem with games press. But the *real* problem they have is that they don’t like the viewpoints of certain segments of that press, and they dress that up as an ethics charge out of intentional or unintentional ignorance.”

-There is a problem with the games press; they agreed. That’s why they have updated their ethical policies and begun disclosures. You might not agree on the root cause.

“Don’t get me wrong. GG has uncovered some small number of ethical improprieties. But they’ve also allowed even bigger ones to pass under their nose without comment. For example, GG was off hunting SJWs while the Shadow of Mordor developer was paying YouTubers for positive coverage of their game — a story the “unethical” and “boycotted” indie sites like Kotaku were owning hard. Why some violations and not others, because only some dovetail properly with chasing away — silencing — certain cultural critiques and critics from games.”

-Your specific example was covered by John Bain (@totalbiscuit) and quickly dealt with. How long should we continue to take a business to task for it’s unethical behavior once it’s been resolved? By the time most knew about it, this already was.

As far as I know, no one has a list of who took the deal that is publicly available. I’m sure deepfreeze.it would be very interested in it if you have one.

“For GG, your event is just another opportunity to score a victory in an ideological battle. They don’t *really* want honest discussion, they want to win and gain legitimacy for their barely hidden viewpoint that some cabal of feminists and radicals are trying to destroy games and “slander” gamers.”

-YES we do. You don’t get to define motivation based on your own ideology for others; that’s dishonest. There are significant elements of gamergate supporters who also oppose Radical Feminism and it’s influence, but this meeting is about ethical journalism, not radical feminism, Social Justice, or even harassment (except where it might intersect with journalism). If the meeting were about those other things, it wouldn’t hold value to the SPJ.

I hope he keeps the blinders you’re trying to slide on him off. There are many other forums talking about harassment, almost entirely one-sided, and here we have one forum to talk about journalistic ethics, and it will be, at minimum, two sided, and that has to be shut down and destroyed by the harassment narrative?

This is an example of what makes the harassment narrative so weak; it has no support, studies of it with respect to gamergate repeatedly show it’s not much of an issue from gamergate, claims made about harassment from gamergate are never supported by any evidence, and yet it’s reported on to the exclusion of all else. Why is it that we can never talk about the ethical issues in journalism that gamergate supporters say they are concerned with, and why is the harassment story so often repeated but never supported?

And this is also why there continues to be no dialogue; those opposing gamergate refuse to discuss anything but the harassment they can’t show but constantly claim, and some profit from directly. They won’t look at the evidence of ethical issues; they won’t consider that gamergate is anything other than the boogeyman it’s been made out to be, and they use it like a universal scape-goat for all of their problems and issues on the internet. They won’t question the authenticity of harassment claims, but they won’t consider the authenticity of claims of ethical issues, and so many of them have made the entire argument and issue of their identity. wormsby seems somewhat reasonable by comparison, but he’s really just dismissive of the whole thing and trying to push it back onto the harassment story. I won’t say what his motivation is for that, but as evidenced by his post here, he is either ignorant or dishonest about it.

I can’t keep pouring time into refuting the same arguments over and over. If this BS is going to kill Airplay, then so be it. At this rate, Gamergate will go forever.

Sorry, but deepfreeze does not use or reference the SPJ Code or its definitions. Rather, it sources its own definitions/rules for what deems ethical and what is not.

Similarly, the SPJ Code does not anywhere state that “SJWs colonizing games” is unethical. It does not state that writing editorials such as “gamers are over” is unethical.

Most of what you guys complain about, and most of the entries on deepfreeze (merely belonging to GJP without any allegation of wrongdoing, giving a game a slightly lower score because of perceived sexist imagery, etc.) are not violations of the SPJ Code.

So no, sorry, the average GG complaint is not grounded in any reasonable interpretation of the code or any other defensible definition of ethics. Certain undisclosed relationships, sure. Pay for play (not that you guys chase that element much)? Sure. This other idelogical nonsense? Sorry, nope, not relevant.

So while I would agree that the SPJ Code would be a perfectly workable set of rules to operate against, most of you — and in particular deepfreeze — just ignore what it says and choose “opposing SJWs” as your underlying cause.

I’m not getting into the harassment narrative because I agree it’s unproductive. I personally don’t care much about that angle. I do care about the intellectual dishonesty in lionizing a nasty partisan sensationalist like Yiannopoulos while pillorying someone Alexander for saying gamers are over. It’s just completely internally inconsistent and nakedly dishonest.

First and foremost, thank you for giving this movement the full journalistic review it so sorely deserves. Dealing with corruption is particularly hard when the corrupt are the ones primarily controlling what information is and is not available. It will also help shed some light on the mistakes made on both sides (though I suspect you will quickly find one side tends to make significantly more “mistakes” than the other).

I’d describe myself as an average gamer. I know a decent bit about GamerGate from watching many, many hours of videos covering it, and while I wouldn’t describe myself as an active participant, I do very much support the cause of ethical behavior in any facet of life, especially journalism. I heard about this event and started listening to everything I could regarding it for the past few days. Listening to you speak and reading the things you’ve written reminds me of Will McAvoy from HBO’s show The Newsroom (which if anyone here has not seen, I recommend you drop everything and go watch it – it’s actually extremely related to the topic of ethics in journalism and is one of the most well written shows I’ve ever watched). I do get the impression that you actually give a shit about finding the truth and reporting on that, and I think that’s something that unfortunately becomes less and less prevalent in our media as time goes on.

There are a few things you should be aware of, if you aren’t already. I think it’s important to keep in mind that it’s not really two factions we’re dealing with here, it’s more of an A vs B + C scenario. On one side, you have GamerGate, and on the other, you have Anti-GamerGate which is comprised of a group of corrupt journalists along with a group of Social Justice Warriors (SJWs). These two groups do have a fair bit of overlap, and at times it can be hard to differentiate them in a particular context. Within the SJWs you will find a mix of radical feminists along with some more reasonable folk who just don’t like the fighting and want it end. The GGers really just want to focus on dealing with the corrupt journalists, but because the tipping point that started the movement happened to involve the disclosure of the personal life of a female game developer and the unethical things she did following, the rad fems feel that the GGers were / are persecuting her and subsequently the other female personalities later revealed to be involved, which led them on a crusade against “misogynist gamers”. In all honesty, GG does not particularly care about the rad fems and would prefer to focus purely on the journalism ethics issues, but it’s hard to be attacked and slandered that brutally and not give any sort of response. As with anything on the internet, you then get third party trolls seeing a perfect opportunity to instigate and add more fuel to the fire. Add to that the tactics of the “professional victims” of the AGG side, who are very much suspected of falsifying harassment in GG’s name to generate profits for themselves, and you have the breeding pool of anger and mistrust that you allude to in your post.

Anyone who would go as far as to actively harass, dox, and/or hack an individual I would argue is not a real GGer by definition. The entire point of GamerGate is to weed out bad ethical practices, and anyone who act in such a manner obviously does not care whatsoever about ethics. That said, people are human, tempers flare, and so it would not surprise me to learn that some actual members of GG (note- not just trolls) may have engaged in this behavior, but I don’t think there is anyone in GG who would support those actions given that by definition it would make them hypocrites. That’s why I think so many people are upset with this post judging by the comments I’ve seen here; I don’t know that you intended it to, but it sounds like you want the entirety of GG to take responsibility for the hypocritical actions of a few idiots in order to even get a chance to fairly defend themselves in the public eye, whereas the opposition has no such need or desire to take responsibility for exhibiting the same amount (or more) of bad behavior because they already ARE the public voice. Basically, in a nutshell, it’s either GG apologizes for behavior they already know and say is unacceptable (most of which is not even the fault of GGers), or there is no AirPlay. Again, I don’t think that’s (or at least I’m hoping that’s not) the intention of your post, but I could certainly see why GGers would take it to mean that, as that’s basically the kind of treatment the movement has grown to expect thus far.

GamerGate wants AirPlay to happen infinitely more than AGG does, because AGG already has a media platform whereas GG does not. Given that AGG has already proven to be unethical, it is expected that the AGG group will do everything within their power to try and prevent this event from happening, lest it does and it finally exposes the truth of their actions to the world. I would not be in the least bit surprised if AGG goes as far as to attempt to masquerade as GG and try to take actions that will get AirPlay cancelled. I ask of you to please keep this in mind; please do not let the actions of a few morally bankrupt individuals keep the mountains of journalism ethics violations hidden from the world.

““Here’s a true test of GamerGate’s commitment: Tell A Man in Black you understand. Calmly and politely tell this man you despise: l’ll do my best to prove you wrong.”

No. When someone attacks you and lies about you and insults you time after time after time after time after time, going groveling to them to politely ask what you can do to appease them.doesn’t demonstrate “commitment” to anything except a lack of self-respect. Abusive people thrive on their victims behaving in the way you encourage.

Of all of these, I do think the question of Brianna Wu possibly (I will add to my mind, almost certainly) being transgender and supposedly doxxed by Milo is of the most interest to journalists, and modern feminists, and radical feminist theory.

I say this as Wu:

1) often promotes herself as the number one victim of GamerGate
2) has promoted her game Revolution 60 as a feminist game that breaks gender norms
3) has enjoyed positive publicity regarding Revolution 60 and herself as a feminist

And yet, her game Revolution 60 has been criticized for
1) having the same sexist female body norms as any “male” game (skinny, blonde, busty)
2) lacking diversity of race, bodies, … (they are all white and slender)
3) being Charlie’s Angels in space

If she is transgender does the criticism of her game support the suspicions and claims of transexclusionary radical feminists and theorists and some medical professionals that transgender women are
1) “really men”,
2) expressing a fetish
3) can’t get rid of their male entitlement and male gaze

Journalistically, was Milo’s confirmation (so-called doxxing of Wu) of what has been long suspected meet journalist ethical requirements?

GamerGate tried being understanding for a solid month. Its what spawned this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7FqXi7SydA All the while being slammed as a group, and in many cases personally. I was told directly by Devin Faraci that I am an “Anti-woman misogynist” for retweeting something said by Baldwin. I was even respectful of Nyberg. Trying to let them know that the information they were spouting was incorrect. I even did a complete breakdown in a twitlonger of why a pinned checklist was inaccurate. She quickly removed it and replaced it with something even more outlandish and as soon as I attempted to correct that one too she called me liar and blocked me. This was before ‘sea lioning’ entered their vocabulary. I am done attempting to be nice.

I hold journalists to journalistic ethics, much as gamergate calls to do so.
I don’t hold gamers (GG or aGG) to journalistic ethics because they are not journalists.

Now inspection of a person’s past can be both ethical and non-ethical, and for different reasons, for journalists and non-journalists.

Examples:

googling a company you are applying to
googling the interviewers
looking up the interviewers on linkedin
looking up the interviewers on facebook
looking up the interviewers on secret

googling your new boyfriend

trying to determine who violentacrez is

publishing what you have found

at hotornot
at people of walmart
at reddit’s the fappening
at a revenge porn site
at hollaback, a site that allows anonymous posting of people with claims of how those people harassed others
at gawker where they refused to take down hulk hogan’s sex tape, where they doxxed violent acrez, and where they demanded reddit take down the fappening

I do hold reporters like Leigh Alexander, Sam Biddle, Steve Tortillo, Milo, AMIB, Boing Boing, NPR, HuffPo, NYTimes, Salon, Nightline to different standards then I hold rando GG and aGG and other gamers.

This is not a “they did it too”. It’s not a “tu quoque”. It’s a clear double standard.

Reporters on gamergate have uniformly been horribly shitty and horribly unethical as they lazily propagate unconfirmed, biased stories.

In the meantime, a small percentage of gamergaters have done mean and rotten things to others.

I would no more throw out all of journalism for the shitty ethics and practices of modern journalists who have been schooled to know better than modern journalists should toss out gamergate for the shitty behaviors of a few who had no such schooling.

I find a majority of the rhetoric on both sides regarding specific individuals to be counterproductive. I would much rather see a reasonable and systematic dismantling of irrational statements and poorly formed conclusions. Yes, sometimes that means researching actions and statements people have made in the past, but there needs to be some level of self-control used to determine what is relevant and what isn’t. Are you providing evidence of an ethical breach, are you providing a rebuttal to a statement or conclusion … or are you just looking to attack and humiliate? There is a pretty significant difference.

Secondly, I want to highlight something else. I know this is probably already apparent, but I’m going to review it anyway. People on BOTH sides have been harrassed, doxxed, swatted, threatened, attacked, etc. Almost universally by unnamed anonymous people. Quite frankly, I don’t care what percent is GamerGate or what percent is AGGros. It’s ALL wrong. Period.

Frustration and anger has been escalating for the past eight months on both sides. I would even go so far as to say that there was already a hidden undercurrent of frustration that had been building slowly for years before this even started. It isn’t going to be easy to calm that atmosphere in only a few weeks, but we should certainly try.

I can not (and will not) apologize for something another individual has said or done, but I will gladly offer my sincerest sympathies for those who have been hurt by their actions.

What is perhaps most appalling to me is that Encyclopedia Dramatica has, in it’s own perverse way, a far more just presentation of the Gamergate and Anti-Gamergate factions than Wikipedia. Could Wikipedia really do no better?

I continue to wish you well, Mr. Koretzky. As for a_man_in_black, anyone who believes 100% of any group is monsters- much less one as vague as a group of hashtag users- has to be somewhat out of touch with reality and unwilling to accept being objectively wrong in even the mildest of fashions.

GamerGate does not condone doxxing or harassment. But the people GamerGate has gone after have not been harassed. They’ve either simply faced backlash for saying stupid shit, or they’ve made up stories – outright lies – in order to make a profit. The professional victims Sarkeesian and Wu have both been caught lying. The FBI have debunked all the so-called “threats” they’ve recieved, and no GamerGater have been arrested or charged. That’s proof that GamerGate has done no wrong.

I’ll say it again, GamerGate does not condone harassment, and anyone appearing at Airplay should not have to worry about their safety. If they do say stupid shit, however, they must be prepared to face reactions from an internet that does not forget and does not forgive.

> What is perhaps most appalling to me is that Encyclopedia Dramatica has, in it’s own perverse way, a far more just presentation of the Gamergate and Anti-Gamergate factions than Wikipedia. Could Wikipedia really do no better?

How could Wikipedia do better?

Wikipedia is not a source of new research.
Wikipedia relies on citations from reputable sources (sometimes more than one)
Wikipedia has banned sources that it deems are not reputable

(as an example the article on a voice for men was only allowed to be created in December 2013, and immediately faced calls for deletion) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:A_Voice_for_Men) and for the longest time (still now?) avoiceformen.com could not be used as a source for Wikipedia.

The sources Wikipedia does deem reputable have mostly misrepresented Gamergate.
Articles on Wikipedia are often warred over and protected by various factions.

As for the rest I hope Nyeberg stays away from kids hacks or not the implications are not good. Hopefully the law will catch wrongdoers of any all types. I don’t care which side of this debacle you are on.

(My understanding of this: to show you are repentant, you must lose a court battle you are almost certain to win, because, contrary to all logic, the ability to vindicate yourself in court is evidence of guilt.)

I have to say this twice because it happens all to often and clearly describing the issue is not easy.

The primary issue with GG is that as a consumer movement (with a sprinkling of professional and academic supporters), people get too tied up with arguing against individual detractors/opposing voices and commonly fall into patterns of de-humanisation by focussing on the (increasingly common) physical attributes such as trimmed beards, dyed hair and above-average body-weights as information with which to insult the opposition as a whole.

Because the majority of people fighting back against a media that turned on them are (for the most part) regular working people (who use/play games to supplement social/relaxation/entertainment activities) many often forget that when someone is hurling constant attacks at your personality and hobby it is the arguments you should respond to not the person using the media provided megaphone for reactionary/narrow minded agenda pushing.

In the past, I’ve been a somewhat active participant in proGG activities. I regularly browsed the 8chan message board, e-mailed a handful of companies about my concern with their ads being on journalist sites that had evidence of collusion, and made GG-themed profile pictures/avatars for fellow supporters who aren’t as adept at photoshop as I am.

What I did not do was participate in any form of harassment towards any individuals, be it over sexual orientation, gender, race, age, or any other conceivable way. On the contrary, I participated in uncovering publicly accessible information on a Brazilian-based gaming journalist who had been harassing Anita Sarkeesian. My mentality, which was shared with the others who assisted in discovering who this person was, believed that the best way to prove we are not a hate group is to help bring those that have harassed into the spotlight.

Anyone can take up the hashtag and post whatever they want. The problem is assuming that those hate-filled and despicable people speak on behalf of every person who genuinely believes in the cause, which has never been anything more than quality and honesty in gaming journalism.

This is no longer just an issue of ethics in game journalism, but has become about ethics in all journalism. Every controversy since the beginning of time has had at LEAST two sides. In GamerGate’s case there are those that are Pro-GamerGate, those that are Anti-GamerGate, those that are undecided or openly neutral, and then the rest of the world that simply don’t care and turn it to their talk shows, game shows, reality shows, and soap operas when a news outlet starts talking about GamerGate.

Sadly, news sites have only covered the harassment, pushed the hate mob narrative and ignored GamerGate. ABC Nightline talked to Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and Tim Schafer for the Anti side, talked to one neutral person, and completely ignored any of the dominant public figures that are pro-gamergate. It is funny to me also that in politics, news outlets demand to see proof, but I’ve not once seen any news media push for proof of the claims or question how they know for a fact the ones threatening are GamerGate. When David Pakman did challenge Brianna Wu with facts that the tweets his team looked at were largely positive Wu quickly called it a hit piece.

Sadly, SPJs willfully ignoring the call for ethics has soured some people to them. I too have to say my view of the group is on shaky grounds as I emailed SPJ Executive Director Joe Skeel about GamerGate which he replied to stating he was going to forward it to a gentleman to discuss it with me and never heard anything after that.

All this lead me to this question in my blog:
“So what is the ethics of a society dedicated to ethical journalism ignoring a group calling for ethics?”

I’m trying to be optimistic about this panel, but with the media repeatedly running one sided or skewed coverage and SPJ staying quite for so long makes it difficult to believe anything will change. Only time will tell…

If you get to this comment, and you didn’t read the comment by distant_worlds, go back and read that one. Follow the imgur link. That’s what GamerGate has to deal with. We can’t prove ourselves not evil to these people. It’s not possible. They’re the ones creating the appearance of evil themselves to justify their attacks against us!

Attempts at polite engagement are met with accusations of sealioning. I see this less often recently, perhaps because people have simply given up on engaging at all, but I’ve experienced the “sealion” label before when I attempted to politely engage, and it’s a difficult barrier to break through.

I get the temptation to embrace the concept of sealioning (getting one hundred polite responses can certainly feel like harassment collectively), but that comic is really quite insidious and, when you actually think about the implications, is both dehumanizing and endorses a rather staggering amount of in-group bias.

Tied into this are things like the Blockbot and (especially) the ggAutoblocker, based on the assumption that no discussion at all, either in good faith or bad, is permissible with “the enemy”. The culture of our opposition is such that, for the most part, engagement in any way is simply derided as either harassment or sealioning. You aren’t allowed to object or discuss. You just get insulted and blocked.

I realize using the term “our opposition” is a huge generalization. I am well aware that there are good people on the other side of this, and there are varying degrees to which they match up with what I’m describing. However, I do believe that the overall culture we are fighting is quite vulnerable to a dangerous amount of ingroup bias. Nobody is ever free from that, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this.

This is the primary reason I’m in GamerGate. I’m not so naive that I believe a society is ever really going to be as classically liberal as it might hope that it is, and that even the most open-minded group is far less intellecutally diverse than it believes itself to be. But surely we can do better than this.

“Calmly and politely tell this man you despise: l’ll do my best to prove you wrong.”

This has been attempted before. Many, many times, with more people than just “A Man in Black”. You’re working under the mistaken assumption that you’re dealing with people who will critically analyze evidence that challenges their most closely held beliefs. You’re not. Or, to put it more succinctly by completely mangling half a quote by Stuart Chase, “For those who Listen and Believe, no proof is possible.”

I’ve been doing my best to fight the CBC with the Canadian contingent of GamerGate supporters and will continue to do so. (You’re free to tweet be at @LunarArchivist so we can discuss the matter further in private.) And I will do everything in my personal power to make sure that Airplay is a success.

When a_man_in_black told you that “100% of gamergaters” were a certain way, you should have realized then he was a zealot and would not be open to reasonable discussion.

I had a very short twitter discussion with him once, and he intentionally took what I said out of context, summarized what I said falsely in a tweet, and retweeted just part of my message to all his followers to create a false impression. That was then used by a bunch of people who ONLY KNOW WHAT HE TELLS THEM as an excuse to mob me because obviously I was a bad person.

Man in Black is mostly harmless. He seems to get a little hysterical for no good reason, as seen here https://archive.is/0S0up .

He DOESN’t use the Blockbot which I actually give kudos to him for. but he does strike me as a little unbalanced and more than a little dishonest.

Have you ever met someone who always looks for the most illogical conclusion and worst possible intention and then claim as a certainty that conclusion is indisputably the right conclusion to have.

Arguments to the contrary will be born with strong affront and evidence or rationality will be waved aside with stoic idiocy.

He doesn’t have respect from Gamergate supporters because he doesn’t deserve it. I actually don’t mind him. There are FAR worse and more harmful creatures in their ranks.
Bobby Oliveria, Arthur Chu. Ben Kuchera they are far worse. I suppose The Zoes, Randis and Anita rank somewhere under these three, mixed with an assortment of despicable Chris Kluwe and Tim Shafers and Devin Faracis and Leigh Alexanders.

Man in Black is a bit of a bottom feeder comparatively speaking. No real threat and really only proficient at unwarranted outrage and hysteria

You can’t apply collective responsibility for a twitter hashtag. Anyone can post anything on twitter. Now, the hubs are moderated, if you visit KiA or gghq, and engage in douchebaggery, there will be backlash to your conduct. Questionable behavior is not condoned.

Said hubs are easier to moderate, but having voulenteers police a # on twitter is a bit more taxing. As people have said, it was not worth the effort to actively prance about looking for trolls to report, all the while painting a target on your back. People still address bad actors, if need be, but not as visibly.

I’m not going to apologize for someone elses actions. If I participate in some bad practice, then we can talk about consequences to my misconduct. You’re just as human as the trolls, are you willing to take responsibility for them? I mean, we are the same species, are you now responsible for everything that other people do?

Condemning destructive behavior goes without saying, and no matter how much a GG supporter publicly does, it’s of no value to anyone opposed to GG in principle – it’s a hate movement.

These whispers will be drowned out the moment they’re uttered. Perhaps I’m too pessimistic, but stacking them will still fall on deaf ears.

To learn the truth, simply go to their spaces (such as KotakuinAction and 8ch’s gamergateHq) and pretend to be one of them. Watch them continually argue with each other that it’s not in fact about ethics.

Just be a fly on the wall, see what comes up more often; ethics, or whining about nebulous “sjw’s” and similar catch-all labels.

The very best thing to do is watch them in real time in various channels at irc.rizon.net, such as #gamergate.me

And if you manage to hang around long enough to get invited to the closed channels, you’ll get to see them organizing. You’ll see exactly what they are about.

You will begin to notice a lot of antisemitism. This is from their roots on /pol/. It’s one big roiling reactionary raid, with a few hapless idiots, and cynical clickbaiters along for the ride.

Don’t take my word for it, if you are a journalist, look for yourself.

I’m going to disagree with bonk91’s conclusions here. Mostly because we’re operating on a different set of biases. But I do agree with him, on that; perhaps, you should lurk moar.
From what I can tell, your neutrality on the whole debacle would be conducive to interesting opinions.

Bonk91, you are not the teensiest bit biased are you? /pol/ has bugger all to do with Gamergate.

8chan DOES have a board called /gamergatehq/. 8chan ALSO has a board called /pol/. YES, some users on /gamergatehq/ also use pol. YES because it is an anonymous board, some anti-Semitic people will make anti-Semitic slurs. How some people occasionally there, in ANY way translates to #gamergate (much less have their roots in /pol/) I don’t know.

Whilst /GamergateHQ /IS active, it is not used by most or even many of Gamergate. Twitter is extremely active. By then so is KIA.

Sure people DO organise….that is not a bad thing. Whilst we are leaderless, there is no issue with rallying behind each other and trying to identify issues and problems. To focus on things as they come to light. Share opinions. Work on solutions.

In all honesty, your handwringing and misrepresentations say NOTHING about us and everything about you. You want Gamergate to be the monster under the bed and will make everyone in it fit your darkest fears.

Mostly Gamergate supporters are simply gamers. Nothing too hardcore about that. Men and women, of all ages, all nationalities, of all ethnicities and races, and all pushing back against what we see as harm to the gaming industry.

Now you possibly do not agree with their fight. That is OK. You may not like what you perceive Gamergate as. You may want to see bad intent or stupidity in everyone. Maybe that makes you feel superior or better to do so.

It doesn’t matter. We aren’t here to make friends. We will keep on keeping on. It doesn’t mean we will nod our heads when you say something as clown shoe ridiculous as you just have.

I don’t promote harassement, i don’t know the whole story about Sarah nybergs but i know about other gamergate “victims” and i fear that a lot of these people hide their hate speech and extremist push of gender politics under the excuse of “they started it first” and i can’t even ask “is that really true? Can you prove it?” without being called a victim blamer, i have lost count of how many of these “victim” have a patreon,receive donation and/or have something to gain by receiving attention

as you said two wrongs don’t make a right, your hate speech isn’t right either just because you claim to be harassed and if you truly want to be neutral i hope you’ll touch this subject

As for antiGG people, you could ask for suggestion from other people that tried to do something similiar like youtuber totalbiscuit and David pakman but i’m not sure you are going to find much, David pakman asked Zoe Quinn and quickly got called out as a monster even though he asked in the most corteous manner as possibile, you could try Erik kain, i remember him attempting to be fairly neutral

Also please stop being so skittish asshole, there now you can shut down everything because i said the a word

I’ll comment under my own full name because you requested a thousand whispers condemning the methods used against Sarah Nyberg – they can hardly be a thousand if none of us dare stand by what we say. So I too will say: I condemn the deplorable things Sarah Nyberg have been exposed to.

But I will add this: I do not think you understand just how much of an uphill battle this is.

The sheer volume of comments in this thread here are not reflective of people passionately believing in the issue; they are relfective of people who yet again pick up their pens, in spite of tired eyes, aching fingers and addled minds. If I could take a soothing icepack to my frontal lobe to mend the fatigue I feel on this subject, I would.

The Gamergate Harassment Patrol was run for the time it was run to prove a point; the people trolling in this manner simply did not care about ethics – instead, they latched on to the issue because it is controvercial. This became established over weeks of working the issue.

But it _is_ work, just as it _is_ work to write this comment – just as it _is_ work to condemn the real life things Nyberg has been exposed to. We are still those who do it, but we are tired. We stick to it because of principle, because the work we’ve comitted at this point has long since felt like far too much effort for the material gains.

It has become a battle of attrition, a long, drawn-out tug-of-war, where we must toil with backbreaking endurance every step of the way.

If this was not an attack on our very identity, and indicative of patterns in our larger society, we would’ve stopped long ago, cast off the weight, and been done with it. But at this point, it is not just about gaming which is admittedly still the core that keeps us together; it is also about the destructive mechanics that have arisen in a world where an individuals network can do more for them than ever before.

There is a sense of, ‘first they came for feminists, then for the atheists, then for the hugos, and now, they’ve come for the gamers’. That if we do not say ‘stop’ here, then where?

And so, why have people been slow to condemn what has happened to Nyberg? Because we are tired, and because nobody listens, and because we all believe it and just nod in agreement when it is brought up.

These are good, sound principles of liberty, brotherhood and freedom we’re arguing in favor of. We are just arguing that people shouldn’t be made to lose their livelyhood on account of political opinions; and that people who enjoy positions of privelege, who have platforms to speak to people from, should not abuse these platforms to run out people and styles of expression from the creative industries. Is that so much to ask? To people like Nyberg, it apparently is, and that is why she stands against us.

It is not callousness that stops us from speaking out against the harassment that has befallen her. It is fatigue. If you believe somebody will finally care to hear that we _are_ against that kind of bullshit? I am ready to offer yout he benefit of the doubt, but just know how long we have condemned and been met with ‘not all of you do’, or ‘you’re just lying’.

Please don’t do the guilt by association thing? Really. We’ve already dealt with that BS for 9 months now, people outside of GG need to realize that every person in GG or out of it is an individual. I won’t say sorry for any harassment Nyberg or AMIB may have lied about, because I didn’t do it. Right down the line. I haven’t harassed anyone and I’m not about to say I’m sorry to harassers.

On the other hand, my personal twitter account is on a list of “the worst harassers ever” or something, the ggautoblocker. Why? Because I follow certain people on Twitter. People that haven’t participated in any harassment (or in fact were the target of it like Mike Cernovich and Christina Hoff Summers). I barely ever even tweet at all, let alone about Gamergate. I have one #Gamergate tweet on my timeline somewhere which is about ethics in journalism. Yet you seem to find it okay for me to be labeled a harasser, because someone somewhere may have sent a fake threat to someone else.

That’s why people are having issues with this post, really. You’re believing people who have made it their job to harass and lie about harassment to make certain people look like the villains. And now I’ve seen tweets from at least one of them attacking you, so that should show you how dishonest these people are and maybe you’ll reconsider.

I find this post to be poor journalism overall, I’m sure you can do better.

Ive been following GG almost since the beginning, done some emails etc. Not active on twitter but have been following the hashtag.

From my observations I can only conclude that both Nyberg and AMIB are trolls. Early on there were attempts at angagement, but ulimately you cant engage with folks who are unwilling to listen and discuss, and who take everything you do or say out of context to present it in the worst possible light. Some people you just cant reach. and some people have proven themselves to be not worth reaching.

There have been many, many examples of immoral and unethical behavior by a number of so called gaming journalists, who used the Gamers are Dead articles to try and deflect attention away from their own actions.

If you spend some decent research time and delve into the actions of the “anti-GG” crowd, you will soon see who are the real harassers and abusers in this whole sorry debacle.

I’m an old git, been gaming for over 30 years – and tbh Ive seen a lot of this before, repeatedly. I’m so jaded with gaming journalism now that I dont actually bother with any of the news sites *at all*, but rely on recommendation, word of mouth and a few credible youtubers like TotalBiscuit.

As far as I’m concerned, Gaming Journalism is Dead, and I’m not their audience.

It’s… well, kind of obvious that we think doxxing is wrong. Of course we’re going to say that leaking someone’s personal information online so that vindictive trolls can harass is cruel. You won’t get the same out of Nyberg, but you will from us, because we have been saying it for nine months and we are tired of others asking us to defend or decry actions that we know are wrong, which we have always known are wrong, and which we did not do.

I have no idea why GamerGate seems to be the only group asked to decry assholes unaffiliated with us. It’s a bit like asking a Catholic nun whether violence done in their name by extremists in Ireland or whatever is wrong. Of course they’re going to say that it’s wrong, and they will likely follow up with, “Why are you asking me?”

Which is why we stopped doing it long ago: We didn’t do it, we’ve nothing to apologize for.

It’s important, I think, also to point out that the mainstream media has a HUGE part in the damage that has been done to people. They, for the promise of juicy and delicious outrage dollars, couldn’t resist blaming ALL the trolling, doxxing, and harassing on GamerGate, leading to a huge influx of third party trolls who realize that they can get maximum exposure (attention is literally the only things trolls strive for) and will never get the blame. The media has always been unable to understand internet culture, and here we have an internet culture war; of course they are going to fuck it up.

“Whatever a troll does under the cover of Gamergate—such as doxxing actress Felicia Day or offering free game codes to accounts that send death threats—is guaranteed to get a lot of attention (far more than typical Internet harassment) and to be blamed not on the individual but on Gamergate collectively. For a troll, this is a perfect setup: maximum effect, minimal exposure. I could dox any woman in gaming, and Gamergate would get blamed. So as long as Gamergate drags on, trolls who care less about games than about causing chaos will wreak havoc.”

Please understand: We’ve been through this before. And we’re tired.

I’ve been here from the beginning, mostly observing and doing comics, but I’m happy to answer questions.

Oh yea, one more thing: a lot of this happened BECAUSE of mainstream media coverage. I think that’s something the SPJ should consider looking into. Their irresponsible disregard for the truth caused people to get hurt. The media no longer passively observs the world and reports on what they see; now they actually DIRECT the world, and make things happen that would not have occurred, had they done their jobs properly. Does that sound like the job of journalism to you? It doesn’t to me.

Just my opinion. Here’s an article of one example of the media disregarding the truth and presentation a one-sided narrative, making it look like GamerGate did something we did not do. (The truth, they said, was too “in the weeds” for their 30 minute segment. What tripe!)

I know there are a lot of comments to read here, but I’ve had a post in moderation since yesterday that I asked to have removed from moderation.

Since it hasn’t been, yet, I conclude the comments are not being read.
And then fwiw, though they are not being read, I am going to repost my comment but without all the links.

That is why we cannot have nice Internet arguments with hyperlinked support.

—————-

Of all of these, I do think the question of Brianna Wu possibly (I will add to my mind, almost certainly) being transgender and supposedly doxxed by Milo is of the most interest to journalists, and modern feminists, and radical feminist theory.

I say this as Wu:

1) often promotes herself as the number one victim of GamerGate
2) has promoted her game Revolution 60 as a feminist game that breaks gender norms
3) has enjoyed positive publicity regarding Revolution 60 and herself as a feminist

And yet, her game Revolution 60 has been criticized for
1) having the same sexist female body norms as any “male” game (skinny, blonde, busty)
2) lacking diversity of race, bodies, … (they are all white and slender)
3) being Charlie’s Angels in space

If she is transgender does the criticism of her game support the suspicions and claims of transexclusionary radical feminists and theorists and some medical professionals that transgender women are
1) “really men”,
2) expressing a fetish
3) can’t get rid of their male entitlement and male gaze

Journalistically, was Milo’s confirmation (so-called doxxing of Wu) of what has been long suspected meet journalist ethical requirements?

As Wu describes the gender norms she tries to break in her work,
would the public, feminists, radfems, feminist theorists and others be interested to know that her game, which some women of color call a terrible game, and offensive to women armedgamer dot com slash 2015/02/revolution-60-is-offensive/ has been frequently compared (negatively) to Charlie’s Angels google dot com slash search?q=revolution+60+charlie%27s+angels and was likely created by a transgender woman?

When it comes to A man in Black, there are a few things to take into account.

When it comes to disproving his claims, I have done so and done my best to convince him. Over and over and over. But any claim he makes, even if you undeniably disprove it, he will repeat it like nothing happened when talking to someone else. He will do this again and again and again. I was among those on twitter in the very first days of gamergate who kept trying to openly talk to people like him or Fiore or EMS.

My mistake, a mistake that a lot of people repeat, including you, is engaging those people with the assumption that they are arguing in good faith. They don’t. Most of the time, especially when they tout “gamergate is a hate group/harassment campaign/anything but what it is, please, please don’t look into the outlets I work at” they don’t believe a word of what they say.

In the case of AMIB, it is easy to see why. He’s a writer at BoingBoing. A gaming blog run by Brandon Boyer, who has a lot of very shady schemes going on. including but not limited to a racketeering mechanism masking as a formerly prestigious indie game development competition (the IGF, for those, see ShortfatOtaku’s first few “Indie-Fensible” videos) If someone is dishonest, follow the money. In this case, he is attacking a group of people that are against corrupt gaming journalism, you follow his money, and arrive at a corrupt gaming journalism website. What a coincidence.

I’m sorry but personally, I’ve wasted way too much energy pretending to believe he was honest about anything he says, and probably, the same goes for you. I later on took a few of those specific people and took to other newcomers that they were trying to confuse and demoralize with their sophistry, explaining what exactly they do. I don’t know how he manages to find the time to, even to this day, spend so much time going after people on twitter.

What few people actually appreciate is that we do not NEED SPJ….at all.
1) Would it be nice? Sure.
2) Would it give us a chance to have a proper televised debate? Maybe (if it comes off).
3) Will it “legitimise us”? Nope, and I think that the act of having a debate or EVEN being endorsed (not that I believe for a moment that will come to pass) by the SPJ, would have a legitimising effect or a that they would have the “authority” to endorse us.
4) Will it present a great platform and opportunity to spread the word? Sure!
5) Have we needed SPJ all these nine months? No
6) Will Gamergate rise or fall on the back of Airplay? Not at all.

So that out the way

1) Do we have ANY case to collectively answer for in respect to Butts or MIB? No.
2) Do we have to respect or play nicely with them or anyone else? No
3) Do we have to answer to SPJ or anyone in SPJ for disliking anyone? No.
4) Do we have to condemn doxing or death threats? NO. Why should we? What the fuck does death threats have to do with us and why is it put to us to condemn?
5) Do we have to accept a narrative that we are behind ANY death threats and doxing? NO. Prove otherwise. (“Oh, yes but there has been some people in Gamergate that do the death threats….you know, but not everyone” – Well prove that IS the case. Because I have yet to see ANYTHING that shows a Gamergate supporter did any)
6) Do we have to defend claims of “being misogynists” or “wanting to get women out of gaming” or anything else of similar hue? NO. It is as intellectually bankrupt and dishonest as the “Only a few hundred people in Gamergate” Narrative (Then over 200 show up in 1 meet up. One of many taking place)
7) Do we have to “tow the line” that ANYONE sets down? NO

I think we need to put all of this in perspective.

Airplay may be nice. It may be of some benefit. I think it has all the makings of a successful venture. but we are not beholden to it. We are doing fine with or without. All those site updating their ethics guidelines? That was us. The revenue “hurt” was us too. every little win is ours.

We do not NEED to control the public’s perception or the propaganda war IF we keep moving forward as we do If it came to a choice of changing the industry for the better and being hated for it or making ourselves look better but not achieving anything, I think it is obvious where we collectively should ascribe value for gamergate

In all honesty, I have no reason to consider either Nyberg or A Man in Black believable.

1) Neither have substantiated any of their claims.

2) Various opponents of #GamerGate have falsified similar claims.

Both Nyberg and A Man in Black begin from the premise that #GamerGate is guilty of whatever they claim and is a hate movement. Any discussion to the contrary is habitually treated with contempt, which has repeatedly killed any attempt to speak with either.

I would not support any such actions of the sort they claim have been carried out, and would decry anyone who took them, if I knew these things to have happened. But to grant automatic credibility is to repeat the mistakes of The Rolling Stone with “Jackie”.

This data was pulled from none other than Randi Harper’s anti-GamerGate blockbot, which showed that 88% of harassers listed on the ggautoblocker were not even GamerGate-related accounts. The remaining 12% represented a total of 65 accounts, out of nearly 10,000 associated to #GamerGate.

So no. Ms. Nyberg and Mr. Black may (if one is inclined to be charitable) be speaking from emotionally dark pits, but they are neither factual in their claims nor bring anything beyond hyperbole to the table.

‘Harassment is wrong and stupid’ That is 100% true. It is wrong because it causes harm to others and it is stupid because it would just be giving ammunition to your opponent. Everyone know that but some will keep doing it. Why? Well maybe they think that they will never be caught, so what they gain out of it trumps any other reason why they should not do it. Maybe their values are not the same as mine – they just don’t care. Maybe they want Gamergate to look bad.

So yeah – harassment should be condemned from both sides. It often is although both sides were guilty of excusing (if not flat out celebrating it) at different points.

What I can say about Sarah is this – She tries her best to provoke. She knows the nature of the beast and knows that the dog will bite if prodded in the right places. The dog bites, the dog gets reported, the dog looks bad. I have followed her Twitter feed for some time. It is relentless. There is only one thing – more often than not she blames GG as a movement for the tweets of individuals. These individuals do not represent GG and in many cases the tweets are not coming from GG supporters. On many occasions I asked her to explain to me how she came to the conclusion that this was related to GG. She never answered any of my tweets. Maybe she gets too much notifications – then again she often replies to others.

People who “fear” going to a professional ethics conference have no sense of perspective on life and such are not credible in any regard.
Anti GG are the “sky is falling” crowd who run around like its the end of the world, when its really just raining.
The onus is on them to prove themselves credible at this point, there is too much on record now from these bad actors, I’d be happy to see them try to defend themselves, but I don’t have much faith in it as they are bullying cowards, and without their clique, held to normal rules of debate and standards of evidence, they have nothing.